Departmental trauma update

An update from Dr. Trey Wofford, ED medical director, and Assistant Professor:

As I write this, we are in the middle of Emergency Nurses Week, and I am constantly grateful for the amazing work that our nurses do on a daily (and nightly!) basis.

EDs around the world, and certainly ours, could not function without this skilled and dedicated group of people. They put in long hours and hard weeks. They deal with difficult patients, difficult situations, difficult disease processes, and difficult social situations each day.

They must think quickly and act decisively. They must know how to handle every bizarre situation that comes their way, and they must know how to improvise when there is not a readymade solution. They are smart, dedicated, resilient, and compassionate.

For the physicians who are smart enough to listen to their advice, they keep us out of trouble! They know when something isn’t right, and they usually know how to fix it. And they often put up with far greater challenges than the general population realizes. But we realize it!

So, from the faculty and resident physicians at UMMC, I would like to say a great big, “thank you” to all our emergency nurses and to all the emergency nurses in all other emergency rooms across the country!

Thank you!