Emergency Room Waiting Times

To add to what KaraBulut said: I work in a large emergency room and wait times are often extended (for waiting room patients) during peak times because we can't get patients already occupying beds upstairs (admitted) or discharged fast enough. It's frustrating for us if there aren't many (or any) hospital floor beds available, but thats just the way it is sometimes. When the triage and charge nurses are receiving many ambulance and waiting room patients at the same time, there's only so much they can humanly do to evaluate and treat all those patients in a timely manner. If we get several chest pains, two traumas and a few shortness of breath patients in the course of an hour, those patients have to come first. So, at least where I work, a charge or triage nurse will evaluate you within about 10 minutes of your arrival- most of the time much more quickly. However, if you have a non-life threatening complaint (and there are 25+ other people in the WR), then you're probably going to have to wait a few hours until you can be seen by a doc.

I think it also has to do with staffing. Where I work, if we had more nurses and physicians, we could use ALL (or at least 98%) of our ER beds 24 hours a day. As it stands right now our minor treatment area isn't open 24 hours/day because there aren't enough staff to care for patients (in that treatment area) after a certain time at night. We just don't have the money in our budget to hire the extra staff.

To summarize, throughput is the name of the game in the ER, and if something in the process gets log-jammed, more patients have to wait.

 

Erm....thanks for the concern, no i didn't die, and I know an emergency is kind of more serious, but are you talking how much it would cost me (since health care is free in Canada) or how much it would cost the Government, I'm assuming you're talking about the latter.

 

The average time of waiting back home (in not in my country right now) is between 8 to 12 hours. Our system sucks beyond everything you can imagine.
I personally went with a close friend to the emergency room, because she had a stomach ulcer, and they made us wait for 8 hours. In the end, when she got to see a doctor, he told that that it was "probably just something you ate". If my friend hadn't had health insurance at work that gave her the right to see a stomach specialist, god knows what would have happened.

 

I went to emergency room like 4 years ago, I got food poisoning with a milkshake and I couldn't breath and felt really weak and also add fever.

1.5 hours of waiting.

 

I used to be a "frequent flier" at the hospital... it seems like most of the time they take you first if you did something like overdose.

 

New update:
I just went to the ER last thursday and waited one hour fifteen minutes.
No screaming children, at a point there was no one in the room but me!!! This happened out of my home country, of course.

 

One other suggestion: If possible take an ambulance instead of driving to the hospital. My experience has been that if you drive, you are likely to have to wait a long time in the waiting room, but if you arrive there in an ambulance you will be taken directly to where the physicians are. You might have to wait just as long, depending on the severity of the problem, but at least it will be quieter and you will be able to lie down.