On Monday this past week, the medical auxiliary team from an emergency room (ER) in one of the hospitals in the Sharon region took a day to work on team building and left their duties at the emergency room. They were able to do this because volunteers from United Hatzalah’s emergency room assistance project took over their responsibilities for the day. The volunteers, each of whom is a trained EMT in their own right, underwent specialized training to allow them to work in the ER and additional training for working as an auxiliary worker for this day. The switch took place on Monday and lasted for the entire day.

“One of the biggest difficulties in emergency rooms is being able to get the entire team together for specialized group training,” said Chani Levanon who heads United Hatzalah’s hospital ER assistance program. “One cannot simply leave the patients unattended and as many of the staff are working shifts, finding a day when everyone can take off is next to impossible. This is where our team came in to help.”

President and Founder of United Hatzalah Eli Beer said: “Many of our volunteers, in addition to volunteering as EMTs, take specialized training that allows them to volunteer in hospital emergency rooms around the country. A group of our volunteers in one of the hospitals offered to fill in for auxiliary workers for a day allowing these workers to leave the ER and focus on team building and re-education as a group. This was a tremendous gesture on behalf of the United Hatzalah volunteers, many of whom took time off from work or spending it with their families in order to help with this project.”

Levanon added: “United Hatzalah’s ER project is currently active in 17 hospitals around the country. The purpose of the project is to have EMTs present in the ER and alleviate the overload that the nurses and doctors feel with the number of patients they have to deal with on a regular basis. The EMTs assist in many of the basic procedures required to perform during patient intake and thus speed up the process so that the patients can receive the care they need faster and the nurses and doctors are not as overwhelmed as they would be otherwise. In this case, the team enabled the auxiliary workers in the ER to have a day of team building and education and recuperate a little bit from their intense workload. They worked in the ER from the early morning hours until 1:00 a.m. on Tuesday morning.”

The head nurse of the ER wrote a thank you letter to United Hatzalah which said: “The volunteers were excellent. Thank you to the United Hatzalah volunteers who helped us tremendously.”

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)