Request: Emergency Room Procedure

A lot of it will depend on the medical, law enforcement and social institutions.

While nobody in serious trouble would ever be turned away from an emergency room, people with non-obvious problems in financially troubled medical institutions will be "allowed" to slip through the cracks.

Depending on the law enforcement locale (nice, peaceful, rich suburban community vs urban warzone), response to a random Jane Doe with no evidence of sexual assault and a memory lapse, the response will vary.

And with varying governmental social program policy will determine admittance and length of stay.

Suffice it to say that I gave you a grittier, more callous response.

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Agreed. A Doctor taking her in, definately not, but nurses operate under far fewer restrictions. It would stretch creduility a good bit though since nurses do tend to compartmentalize work from home fairly well. While there may be some in some area, I cannot think of a law against it, but hospitals may have rules against it. I simply do not see how a nurse who would do such a thing would have maintained herself in the job (psychologically) long enough to do it.

What you describe woudl keep her in the hospital for at least a week, yes with much of that time being spent in their psych eval ward. Even a busy hospital with a lot of "flow through" would make room for someone with that sort of brain damage. A teaching hospital woudl not only make room for her, but she'd be a star attraction.

Agreed.

A certain amount of clinical detachment is required to do the job without going nuts(er). Becoming involved with your patients on more than a very shallow level of familiarity can be extremely problematic. ESPECIALLY if some of the patients aren't quite in their right minds.

Several of the young women I worked with had issues with stalkers due to not maintaining enough professional reserve.

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However, I do think that a female nurse taking in a female patient would be somewhat more believable for the purposes of a story than a female nurse taking in a male patient or a male taking in a female or a male taking in a male.

I am not doing a Scrubs fanfic (nor is the hospital a teaching hospital), but the principle applies: Would JD or Cox be able to order the MRI/CAT, or would they need Bob Kelso's say so?

Moreover I am thinking a relatively young/naive nurse, possibly one who was briefly homeless herself. Definitely not someone with decades of emotional calluses (callouses?) built up.

I have no clue who those people are (I don't watch Scrubs) but anyone with the word "doctor" on their name can order such tests, especially in an ER situation. Outside the ER it will depend on hospitla pecking order. Again, in my area, any doctor working a particular patient's case could order such tests if they were deemed necessary (regardless of insurance, in fact). different hospitals will have different "access" to testing based on state and federal law (and in come cases county or city laws as well) and hospital policy, but it will be fairly universal over a given state.

As a rule of thumb, generally any doctor on a case can order any test they can medically justify without insurance and any test they can handwave well enough to make it seem diagnostically necessary if good insurance is present. It is better to overtest, overcharge and get called on it than undertest and get sued for malpractice.

Since there are two known general causes of memory loss, one is head trauma and the other is psychological breaks, it is pretty much a given she'd be x-rayed, then CAT scanned and then MRIed and possibly fMRIed as each previous test would show a need to furthur investigation with the next "level" of test and most likely admitted as a patient (rather than an ER patient) after the CAT.

As for the nurse, odds are she'd be even more restricted in what she could do than an older more experienced one. The Nightingale Effect is well known and well undertstood in medical circles and is guarded against fairly well by not just policy but culture. That doesn't just include love or sexual situations but feeling they need to continue caring for a patient after they're discharged. If a caregiver acts on such an impulse it is considered highly unethical and termination usually follows swiftly. In mental health facilities, they're even more on guard for it and termination is even swifter since it's viewed (rightly or wrongly) as a caregiver taking advantage of a mentally ill patient. There are entire training programs nurses (and doctors in some cases) are put through to teach them to guard against the Nightingale Effect and how to deal with Transference.

It is POSSIBLE a nurse would take her in. Yes. Is it very likely that a nurse would do something that will very likely kill her career, blackball her from the profession forever, act as a serious ethical black mark on her job record, make years of training and schooling useless and throw her entire life out the window in favor of a single patient? Not likely at all, vanishing small in fact.

However, this is your story. You can decide what bits and bobs of reality to ignore and what bits and bobs of ignored reality the reader will give you a pass on without breaking suspention of disbelief.

This is called "la belle indifference."

Any of the Doctors can order that stuff as they want...

Both JD and Elliot have dated patients so a Nurse taking a women in would not even raise an eyebrow, but both might talk to her about it.

As far as care... I'd go with in between Redbone and HyperStrike's scenario as Kelso would be trying to get rid of the patient but the other Doctors would try to keep her and get her the best care possible. In fact I could see that Kelso's cutting her time could be the catalyst to a scheme to getting a Nurse to take her in to make sure she isn't lost in the system.

Thanks very much for this reference! It may even end up as the story title.