From the other side - treat your patients and get them out. Four years ago it took 8 hours to diagnose my son with appendicitis. My husband threatened everyone in sight to get him some pain medication. That hospital is closing this year. The surgeon actually taught the doctor how to press in the right place to do the old pain test for appendicitis AFTER the CT scan.
In August my son was at another ER after a car crash. $23,000 for four hours which included a tetanus shot, pain pill,urine test for sugar levels and total spine CT. I was there, I know. If he had Medicare or employee based insurance there would have been a HUGE write off. Instead he owes $13,000. I was office manager for a group in 1980 who raised their prices to increase Medicare reimbursements for the future.
The ER culture of making people wait when they get into one of those little rooms in the back is so wrong, I would love to see them run with a little efficiency and sense.
On the happy side- in a country with socialized medicine, a patient with appendicitis would have to wait a much, much longer period of time- days, even- just to get into a room, much less be treated. You may fault American ER care all you wish- but I have been to multiple countries to study emergency care and I would still take my kid to an American ER first, bar none.
Regarding waiting after being taken back: the pace of the ER treatment is driven to a very large extent by the pace at which the diagnostic studies go. It's frustrating as a nurse as well to have to wait for the lab to process a blood test, or for the Radiologist to get around to posting his findings, or for a room to open up on a patient care unit. We can't change that. But any nurse/MD worth his/her salt will do everything possible to keep the patient/family informed and comfortable.
I cannot really say any fairer than that. I am sorry that your experiences were unpleasant ones.
I had an experience like that. I took my then-six months pregnant wife into an ER with side pains. Seven hours in the ER later she was getting an “emergency” appendectomy.
I understand your frustration, I’ve had to go to the ER with family a few times. I don’t work in a hospital, but I am a medical professional and understand why it takes so long at an ER. They aren’t going to treat until they rule everything out. They need documentation so they order test, scans, etc. Everyone, including the doctors, wait for the various departments to have someone available to run the test, then they can properly diagnose.
One of the big problems is people without a family doctor use ER’s for general medicine.
BTW the one I love is the person that calls at 5:10 on Friday afternoon and thinks they may have xxxx. They’ve felt bad since noon on Wed, but just decided it might need attention.
Is 8 hours good of bad? Cause it took my doctor and various specialists over 3 months to diagnose me (properly) when I had appendicitis. I avoided the ER, though, because I had been sick with something nobody could figure out for three months, then on a road trip to NYC I started throwing up and was in so much pain I could hardly move. I took a lot of painkillers, and when I got back (on a Saturday morning) I called the doctor. The whole ‘pain test’ didn’t work, as my doctor decided it was probably a kidney stone, maybe a kidney infection, maybe female issues, and a slim chance of appendicitis. However, when the CAT scan showed nothing, someone finally figured that since everything else was eliminated, it must be my appendix, and it turned out that was true when they went ahead and did the surgery.
Then, a couple weeks later, I had kidney stones. But, when I had come in complaining of intense pain where I recently had intenstinal surgery, nausea, vomiting, and fever, I guess the nurse assumed the surgery site had become infected, so I got in and got some pain meds within 30 minutes. So, I spent from 9 PM to 3 AM in the ER on a saturday night, which was quite the educational and somewhat amusing - probably due to aforementioned pain meds - experience. There were definitely people in there who were fishing for drugs, including a loud, crude lesbian couple, one of whom needed ‘stronger’ pain meds than she was already on for her back pain, and two separate family groups who both brought all of their hyperactive children because one of those children ‘had a toothache and needed vicodin’.
The ER is so broken. Mostly because the ER is abused by “patients,” but everyone pays for that.