Research Paper on:
Emergency Room Decision Making

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
required in a number of situations ranging from severe injuries to serious allergic reactions to accidental poisonings to seizures to respiratory distress to many complications which fall in between these  primary five (Livingston, 1995). Isenstein (1999) identifies the emergency departments of the hospitals across the nation as the "bulwark of the countrys health care system". Indeed, this emergency room  network provides critical treatment to thousands of patients a day. One of the even more frequent applications of emergency medical services, however, is in cases of cardiac arrests.  In the event of cardiac arrest, perhaps more so than any other event, emergency medical services can mean the difference between life and death. The first task facing the  emergency nurse is to thoroughly review the sometimes complex symptoms which accompany such cases. Such is the situation in the case of a 52 year old female who has  admitted to the emergency room with a probable heart attack (myocardial infarction). This patient, like many who admit to the hospital is in what some physicians refer to as  a "golden hour", a window of opportunity for treatment which exists only immediately after an injury or some event like a heart attack if irreparable harm and indeed loss of  life is to be prevented (Isenstein, 1999). The statistics regarding coronary artery disease make it obvious that emergency medical services are  critical in saving the lives of those patients who succumb to the disease. Coronary artery disease is the number one killer in the United States (Sullivan and Sullivan, 1997).  Indeed, an acute myocardial infarction, e.g. a heart attack, most often leads to death. When such an infarction occurs, however, a patients access to emergency medical services can