A Comparative Analysis of Emergency Room, Urgent Care Centers and Physician Office Visits

Katherine Ebrahim, Verrazzano Class of 2025, completed major in Nursing 

For my capstone project I reviewed literature on the utilization of the Emergency room (ER), Urgent Care centers (UCC) and Physician offices (PO). The aim of this literature search was to analyze why patients may choose to go the ER over UCCs and POs, and explore how health care professionals can guide patients to the appropriate care settings and provide solutions to direct patients to the best option. Each of these three locations provide a slightly different service. Comparing the overlap and fine tuning their use can result in better overall care to patients.

A large factor that affects patients is access to care. If patients are in a location where they only have an ER as a close option for care, they might choose to go there even when an UCC would suffice. If a person’s PO or UCC is closed at the time that they are seeking care they would be forced to go to the ER for medical treatment or risk not being able to receive any care.

Ensuring that UCC’s remain open to patients can allow them to seek treatment. It is also important to remember that some patients do not have regular visits with a health care professional. This lack of connection to a primary care physician may be the cause of a lack of access to PO visit.

This data could help to identify when each location is used, and how accurately patients are selecting the appropriate location to visit. This can lead to improving patient decisions through healthcare guides and decreased unnecessary ER visits.

I chose this area of research because the ER is something I am very passionate about. I was also interested in how to help both patients and the health care team. The research for this project was very interesting and there were a variety of papers that I found compelling. Learning more about this topic and being about to speak about it to friends and family has made me appreciate the patients that ER workers have to treat. I found it surprising how many articles I was able to find on my topic because I was worried I wouldn’t find enough. Overall, I have learned that researching about a topic you are interested can be rewarding and teach you more about your topic.

Impacts of Overcrowding in the Emergency Room

Julia Calvo, Verrazzano Class of 2024, completed major in Nursing 

Reflecting on the process of working on my capstone, this project has taught me many things about myself. For starters, I learned that I was able to balance and prioritize many tasks throughout the semester. Working as a full-time emergency room nurse, being a full-time college student, and maintaining the process of working on my capstone, I had a lot of balancing to do throughout my last two semesters. I was able to balance work, school, my capstone project, and making time for my friends and family.

During this process there were times where I was overwhelmed or anxious about meeting deadlines. However, this process also showed me that I am determined. When I set goals for myself, I am determined to complete them. Working on my capstone was encouraging as it helped me research a topic that I was captivated by in the emergency room.

As a full-time ER nurse, I see first-hand the issue of overcrowding at the hospital where I work. I see the difficulties that ER nurses experience when trying to provide adequate care for a large ratio of patients and seeing the struggles that the patients experience due to overcrowding.

I think this capstone project gave me the opportunity to investigate reasons why overcrowding occurs in the ER and what can be done to resolve this issue. It also gave me a great opportunity to work with my mentor who is an ER nurse and was my professor for my first semester of nursing school. It was a great to work with Dr. Jennifer Macchiarola to research contributing factors to overcrowding in the ER and to find strategies that can be implemented into ER care.

I believe I benefitted greatly from this project because I learned about strategies that I can implement into my current nursing practice to promote patient satisfaction and help reduce overcrowding. I also believe that nurses and patients can benefit from my research findings on ER overcrowding because it will increase awareness of this global issue and nurses can find ways that can help them deliver quality care to patients. Overall, I believe that this project greatly impacted my career as a nurse. I can apply what I learned to my everyday practice to make a positive impact for nurses and patients.