Mark is the Trauma Program Manager as well as a staff nurse at the Community Hospital in Anderson, IN. He walks us through a typical nursing shift and the protocols for responding to a fall emergency. When not on the floor, Mark is reviewing various hospital departments for quality of care assessments as well as leading injury prevention classes for the community.
Transcript
My name is Mark Holfing and I am a nurse. I work as the Trauma Program Manager at Community Hospital in Anderson, Indiana. Trauma Program Manager position is a job that has a lot of diversity to it. So I do everything from injury prevention, we try to cover the whole scope of injury prevention and treatment in the community. And so, injury prevention all the way into working with EMS and fire and emergency services type people. Spend a lot of time working with folks in the emergency department and the surgery team all the way as patients visit the ICU and out on the floors of the hospital then through rehab and discharge. For more severe injuries we have a highest level activation, but for a typical fall those patients will receive a lower level activation which kind of alerts our team in the emergency department to be ready for when they come in. And then when they get there you kind of do a quick assessment of how serious do things look right at the beginning of things. Is the patient conscious? All those types of things. And so, once the patient comes in, gets a brief assessment, usually those patients go straight to the CT scanner. We wanna get a good picture of the inside of their head pretty quickly to see if there's bleeding going on, if there's fractures in places... And that really determines a lot of things. If they're lucid, if they're alert and oriented, they don't have bleeding into their head, we'll watch 'em for a little while and see what other injuries they may have. If they do have bleeding into their head, and so sort of the other end of the spectrum is those patients will get a really quick neurosurgical consult. Usually the neurosurgeon will look at the films, come in evaluate the patient, and will try to be in the operating room within an hour, hour and a half. Some weeks I have three or four days where I'm out at meetings either over in Muncie or down in Indianapolis. Whether it's injury prevention meetings or state trauma care committee meetings. So I kind of have to handle that end of things. I'm out meeting with people in the community. There's injury prevention classes, there's a class called Stepping On, which we're getting ready to launch which is oriented around falls prevention in the elderly population. I do spend a decent amount of time sitting behind a desk looking at cases and reviewing cases for quality, doing process improvement. And then there's a number of just projects that are sort of always ongoing. Things that we're trying to take to the next level in our hospital. Again, I touch a lot of different areas. Whether it's related to massive transfusions or ultra sound exams in the emergency department... Lots of different, lots of different things there.
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