Emergency Rooms Get a Makeover for the Elderly

          The majority of emergency rooms nowadays are built and designed for more emergent and dangerous situations such as heart attacks and gunshot wounds. However, seniors tend to come into emergency rooms problems that are minor compared to a gunshot wound such as diabetes, or injuries from fall. While most ERs just treat the main problem that is presented, ERs that are designed for geriatric care also seek out the cause of the problem in hopes of eliminating the case of it ever happening again. As the population of retirement-age persons continue to increase, there becomes a growing need for geriatric specific ERs to be able to help all populations of our community. One large issue that older patients find with typical ERs is that they are chaotic and loud. In one patient's testimony, it was stated that every time she was in the ER, "she was either near somebody who was a drug overdose, a stabbing victim or a crying child, and she hated it so much that sometimes she would even leave, against medical advice." With the renovated ERs such as the one at the UC San Diego facility, they contain amenities such as "sound-absorbing walls, a lighting system that orients patients to the time of day to combat delirium and nonslip flooring to protect against falls."
          As a registered EMT myself. I can attest to the fact that elderly patients are not as comfortable with the emergency medicine environment as the younger generation are. They are more easily spooked and I am always. Older patients are more hesitant to go to the emergency room or even got in the ambulance in the first place. Because of occurrences where the patients are not comfortable with the environment, ERs could be losing lots of money on these patients. By changing the "product" to be geared more towards more than just one certain population and promoting these new changes, companies could pull in more customers and therefore get a higher profit than before without the geriatric-specific ER centers.