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One of the doctors on staff in the Freeman Neosho emergency room is Dr. Jim Pyron, emergency department physician.
“I usually get up at 5 every morning to have time to get myself prepared for the day,” Pyron said, “do a little relaxing before I go to work.”
Pyron’s workday begins at 7 a.m.
“The first thing that I do is transfer any patients that are still there when the night doctor can’t finish up,” Pyron said. “So, we have a handoff of patients, go over what the doctor has done, what still needs to be done and so that I can go ahead and take over the care of that.”
Pyron said that takes a few minutes.
“Then I check out the nursing staff and seeing who is on today, who is doing what, who is assigned to what rooms and those type of things like that, getting job assignments assigned. That is the way that it usually starts off. Some days there is nobody here at all and that doesn’t take but a couple of minutes, and some days every room is full and sometimes that takes 30 minutes or so.
“Occasionally, you come in right in the middle of something. Recently, I came in the middle of somebody that was having some major breathing problems and you just jump right in the middle of that and everything else has to wait for a while. So, you never know what is going to happen.”
Pyron has been with Freeman Health System since 1978. He started as an emergency physician at Freeman Hospital in Joplin. Pyron was director of the emergency department for a little more than 20 years. About four years ago, he moved to Freeman Neosho.
“Basically, the big duty is to see and take care of everything that walks through the door,” he said. “With the emergency department, you never know what is going to walk through the door. It could be anything from a sore throat or splinter or major trauma with somebody about ready to die or cardiac arrest, heart attack, strokes, amputations, all kinds of things like that. So it runs the whole gamut.”
That is actually one of the reasons why Pyron got into emergency medicine.
“I was trained several years ago – originally started out in family practice and I really did not like that and emergency management was barely getting started at the time, in the mid-1970s,” he said. “I started doing that for a while, found out that I liked it because I liked being able to come to work and have no idea what is going to happen that day. It could be a little bit of everything. It was kind of exciting being able to help people that were severely sick or severely injured.”
One of the doctors on staff in the Freeman Neosho emergency room is Dr. Jim Pyron, emergency department physician.
“I usually get up at 5 every morning to have time to get myself prepared for the day,” Pyron said, “do a little relaxing before I go to work.”
Pyron’s workday begins at 7 a.m.
“The first thing that I do is transfer any patients that are still there when the night doctor can’t finish up,” Pyron said. “So, we have a handoff of patients, go over what the doctor has done, what still needs to be done and so that I can go ahead and take over the care of that.”
Pyron said that takes a few minutes.
“Then I check out the nursing staff and seeing who is on today, who is doing what, who is assigned to what rooms and those type of things like that, getting job assignments assigned. That is the way that it usually starts off. Some days there is nobody here at all and that doesn’t take but a couple of minutes, and some days every room is full and sometimes that takes 30 minutes or so.
“Occasionally, you come in right in the middle of something. Recently, I came in the middle of somebody that was having some major breathing problems and you just jump right in the middle of that and everything else has to wait for a while. So, you never know what is going to happen.”
Pyron has been with Freeman Health System since 1978. He started as an emergency physician at Freeman Hospital in Joplin. Pyron was director of the emergency department for a little more than 20 years. About four years ago, he moved to Freeman Neosho.
“Basically, the big duty is to see and take care of everything that walks through the door,” he said. “With the emergency department, you never know what is going to walk through the door. It could be anything from a sore throat or splinter or major trauma with somebody about ready to die or cardiac arrest, heart attack, strokes, amputations, all kinds of things like that. So it runs the whole gamut.”
That is actually one of the reasons why Pyron got into emergency medicine.
“I was trained several years ago – originally started out in family practice and I really did not like that and emergency management was barely getting started at the time, in the mid-1970s,” he said. “I started doing that for a while, found out that I liked it because I liked being able to come to work and have no idea what is going to happen that day. It could be a little bit of everything. It was kind of exciting being able to help people that were severely sick or severely injured.”
Pyron said he usually stays busy each day. As far as what he does at say 10 a.m., Pyron said that is when the emergency department sees a lot of walk-ins. Most of the “really sick people” can come in any time, he stated.
“But the emergency department, in the last few years, has also turned into almost an outpatient clinic, where a lot of people that don’t have family doctors or don’t want to use their family doctor, end up coming into the ER for routine care everything from dental things to colds to sore throats to skin rashes and to a lot of things that normally would be seen in the doctor’s office,” he said.
He also noted that at 5 p.m. there are a lot of walk-ins.
“You catch up when you can,” he said. “If you have fairly simple things that you can see and identify right away, about four people an hour is about the maximum number that usually that you can see and get out of here. So if you have eight people registered – even if you got simple things – that puts you two hours behind right there. Generally, by 2 or 3 in the afternoon, we are usually an hour or two behind, most of the time.”
The doctor’s shift runs on a 12-hour shift. But when the clock strikes 7 p.m., that necessarily doesn’t mean it’s time to go home.
“The last thing that I do is to try to finish up all of my paperwork,” Pyron said. “There is a huge amount of paperwork, the amount of paperwork associated with that medical records keeping and other things is just probably tripled or quadrupled over the last 10 or 15 years. So I spend all most of my as much time per patient in paperwork as I do seeing them and interacting with them all. Then at the end of the day, then you got 45 minutes or an hour of paperwork to try to finish up before you go home. So that is usually the end of everything, making sure that the paperwork is done.”
With that in mind, Pyron usually gets out of the hospital around close to 8 p.m.
Then it is time to go home to his wife, Karen.
“My wife usually has dinner at that time, and try to get in bed by 9:30 p.m. so I can get up and do it again, if I work the next day,” Pyron said.” If I don’t get seven hours of sleep, it makes for a hard day the next day.”
