Kim Rahn is the managing editor of The Korea Times. Since joining the company in 2003, she has covered various beats including the presidential office, Seoul city government, the Bank of Korea and the tourism industry. In 2014, she won the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) award for her coverage of the ordeals of migrant women in Korea.
Inconvenience for improved safety
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By Kim Rahn
One Sunday afternoon in mid-July, my eight-year-old daughter developed a high fever ― more than 39 degrees Celsius ― that refused to go down despite giving her a fever reducer. So we headed to Severance Hospital, the nearest big hospital with a separate emergency room (ER) for child patients. (It is a mystery why children always get sick in the evening or on the weekend, when neighborhood clinics are closed.)
My daughter used to get sick very often when she was five to six years old, forcing the family to take a trip to the ER two to three times a year. She has gotten healthier since turning seven, and this latest trip to the ER came after a long interval.
And the ER operations system has completely changed since our last visit.
Until my previous visit to the ER in September 2014, we would briefly tell a hospital staffer at the entrance why we came and then directly head to the children’s ER. After waiting for our turn, we would see a doctor there, who would check the symptoms and decide the necessary treatments.
During the whole process, anybody could enter the ER, and there was no limit to the number of visitors per patient. So, it often happened that the mother, father, grandmother and grandfather came to the ER to take care of one young patient.
But not anymore.
First, while there were two available entrances to the ER before, there is now only one, so my family could no longer directly head for the ER from the parking lot but instead had to go out of the building to get to the entrance from the outside.
In addition, a hospital staffer introduced us not to the children’s ER but to a waiting room for all patients, children and otherwise. Patients were allowed to enter the ER only after undergoing preliminary examination by two medical staffers in front of the waiting room, who then passed the information on to doctors inside the ER. Of course the new process made our stay at the hospital longer than before.
After the preliminary check, we were allowed to enter the ER _ but not all of us. Unlike before, the hospital provided only one guardian a pass with a bar code that enabled them to enter the ER after scanning the bar code by a reader beside the door. So I got the pass and my husband stayed in the waiting room.
But because a child is now accompanied by only one guardian, the ER is less crowded and rather quieter, more pleasant. Of course, some mothers had difficulty handling their babies and all their belongings, such as their bags and Ringer solution pole, but other than that, most people inside the ER had no major problems.
Then I realized it was my first visit to the ER since the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) swept the country last year, from which all these ER changes came.
At the time of the epidemic, a majority of the infection happened at the emergency room at Samsung Medical Center. Critics pointed out that the poor hospital practices in Korea, such as no limit in the number of visitors to sickrooms and ERs, contributed to the spread of the infection.
The preliminary check in today’s ERs is intended to filter people with infectious diseases and prevent them from wandering all over the ER and hospital. In addition, the limit of only one guardian per patient was intended to minimize the chances of infection among visitors in case of an epidemic.
It took longer to get treatment owing to the more complex process, but I was glad to see that hospitals were improving their systems, that at least they were doing something to change, while many parts of society do not, despite mass disasters and strong criticism.
One thing that has not changed much is the attitude of visitors. Sometimes, despite the one-guardian rule, a second guardian would try to sneak into the ER by closely following other people who opened the ER door with their pass. When nurses and staffers told them, “One guardian per patient, please,” they went out of the ER but always came back.
It may take decades or strong penalties to make hospital visitors follow the rules. But I still have hope that people will someday realize that the changes in hospitals are a necessary inconvenience for a greater good.