It rather presents a summary of the instruments and facilities available and continues with the two important criteria to determine patients who are subjected to these services (age and common diagnoses).
The Adult Trauma Service chooses to include part of the description of the serviced population in its mission and scope purpose, but continues to detail on this with the exact same criteria used by the Emergency Department (diagnostic groups and age groups served). However, the mention of the geographic area of activity of the Emergency Department helps in delimiting the geographical area in which the services are available, thus introducing a third additional descriptive dimension in use here. The Emergency Department makes no clear mention of its geographic location, although it refers to being in the State of Washington (this is comparative to a distinct sentence in the case of the Trauma Center limiting the services to Pierce County and the five county area).
The last thing described in the content of both documents is the staffing. The staffing description can be both quantitative and qualitative. While the Trauma Center document presents an exclusively quantitative description, the Emergency Department staff description is less quantitative and more qualitative, briefly referring to the quantitative structure of the staff in order to emphasize more on the skill requirements and the staff capacities.
As such, the description of the staffing includes a list of responsibilities and the staffing pattern, along with a descriptive table of the competencies in each of the cases of the staff members. The table is visual, placing on the rows the positions on the staff and in the columns, the competencies available, with Xs to tick the appropriate competencies for the appropriate position.
The Trauma Center is simple in listing the number of positions currently occupied and in showing the structure of the staff in terms of physicians, nurses, administrators etc.
The code of conduct is exhaustive in providing a general set of rules and regulations that can be applied in different potential situations. This goes from discharge to transfer or brain death. The role of this code of rules and conduct is to provide the necessary framework by which a decision can be made in a certain situation. In hope of covering all potential situations, this subchapter has been extended over one and a half pages, while it is more or less missing completely (despite bits and pieces across the other subchapters) in the other document.
The mention of the professional standards in the Emergency Room document is useful in giving the ethical framework to which the organization adheres, namely the ENA and the ANA standards. The references just give a bibliography of sources that the organization uses in terms of nursing procedures.
The comparative analysis of this document revealed that while the Trauma document provided a very applied description of services, starting with the mission and scope as context units, and moving into the staffing and the population targeted, the Emergency Department insisted on the framework of rules and on the particular competencies of the staff.
The coding method that could be used here relies on the following main context units: mission/scope, targeted patients (by age and diagnosis), code of rules and conduct, staffing, ethical code by which the organization abides. One should note, however, that these were not necessarily present in both of the documents, but mention of each category was done throughout the texts. Both of the documents had the same main purpose, that of providing an information background on the activity performed in their respective organization, but the approach differed, according to the consideration previously mentioned.
