It’d be interesting to know whether they turned away trauma patients or just general ambulance patients. Hospitals routinely turn away ambulance patients when they’re busy. Trauma patients arriving by ambulance, however, continue to be seen unless the trauma facility has become saturated.
Diverting ambulance patients with non-critical conditions because you need time to straighten out the records doesn’t strike me as a major issue. The same thing happens when the waiting room’s full of flu patients.
A review of the article indicates it was a busy diversion. They were continuing to take walk-in patients.
Irritating, inconvenient for the patients, and something that should be designed around, but if you think about it, it’s actually an indication that the computer system enabled them to treat more patients than the old manual records system would have permitted.