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Maybe The ER Shouldn’t Be A Fun Place For Kids

What’s the deal with hospital stickers these days?  I found this sticker laying around in Happy’s emergency department the other day.  Should we be encouraging children to come to the emergency room and feeling happy and excited about the sticker they get?  I’m not sure putting a happy robot on a sticker and proclaiming ones exciting visit to the emergency is the best public health policy.  Perhaps we need to take a different course of action before another entire generation of  citizens feel obliged to use the emergency department as their sole source of medical care.  Perhaps instead of a hospital sticker, children in the emergency room would all get a saline injection in their shoulder.  Now that’s the kind of memory you want kids to have of their emergency room visit. They should fear the hospital and do everything in their power to stay healthy as adults.  Not feel giddy about happy robots on hospital stickers.

Do children get hospital stickers at your facility?

*This blog post was originally published at A Happy Hospitalist*

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