Participant Observation Essay

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On Monday, September 6, 2010, I began my first day observing patients in an emergency department. My goal was to observe interaction between the patients and the hospital staff, especially in pediatrics. I chose a local hospital at which I had been employed and observed some of my co-workers patients. I did this on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 5:00-5:45 pm for three weeks. My thought was that hospital staff tends to interact more with pediatric patients than adults. In order to accurately observe this, I recorded all the patients that came into Pod A on those days. I wrote down their age, what they were there for, and how many times the nurse walked into the patient’s room and how many times the tech walked into the patient’s room. I also recorded how the patients and staff interacted and who initiated the interaction. When I walked into the emergency department on the first day of observation, I saw a big rectangle with desks in the middle and glass doors surrounding them. I noticed four different sections of the emergency department: Pod A, Pod B, Pod C, and Pod D. There is also the charge desk. Each pod had two staff, a nurse and a tech. Pod A contains rooms 1-6, B contains 7-12, C contains 13-18, and D contains 19-24. The ED is shaped like a rectangle, with pods A and B on one side and C and D on the other. In the middle I saw a box shaped room known as the fish bowl. The walls of the fishbowl are all glass. When you look inside you see all the doctors doing they’re work on a computer. This is they’re main office. Outside of the fishbowl, next to Pod A, is the charge desk. This is where the charge nurse does all of his or her work for the day. When an ambulance brings in a patient, they stop at the charge desk for triage. The nurse collects all the information about the patient and puts them in a room. Once the patient is in the room

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