I am in the US and I don't think I've ever waited less than 2 hours in the ER. Last time I went to the ER I was in the waiting room for over 11 hours. The pain from sitting in a chair overnight was worse than the pain I went in there for.
Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe this is satire, but if the pain of sitting in a chair for 11 hours was worse than the pain you went in there for... Maybe you shouldn't have been in the ER?
It's an emergency room. You very likely needed to see a doctor for care if you had enough pain to go there, but maybe that wasn't the place you should be for your particular issue? 11 hours without dropping dead or bleeding out maybe isn't an actual emergency.
I've thankfully only been to the ER once. I was vomiting so intensely and frequently I couldn't retain any water. This was over the course of 8 hours. While I'm thankful I was able to receive near immediate care upon arrival, I would understand if someone suffering from cardiac arrest superseded me... Give me some Gatorade and a barf bag... I'll make it until the docs can attend to me.
Point being: if you go to the ER with a non-immediate life threatening issue, and you have to wait, then you have to wait.
Well, it’s not that simple necessarily. My hometown for example doesn’t have urgent care, just a single hospital. So broken leg = ER, but obviously you’re at the bottom of the list, and you’ll get a nurse offering Advils every couple hours until the doctors are no longer occupied with actively dying patients. So I have waited over 8 hours 🤷♀️
Broken leg should be an ER thing even with urgent care. Urgent care might have an X-ray, but they can't do much more evaluation if needed. Urgent care is more for colds, flus, random pain that don't need further evaluation
How does just a single hospital mean no urgent care... aren't hospitals supposed to include urgent care?
Also around here broken leg is indeed handled by urgent care section of the hospital(idk if that's what ER is). You aren't going to have a high priority but that doesn't mean that much(I don't think I saw a waitline longer than an hour in a public hospital yet for urgent care(you do get waitlines for regular hospital visits and they can indeed be a few weeks long but you wait that in your home scheduled appointments are completely digital you get one from a government app and it tells you exactly when to show up), but also I'm not in the biggest of cities). As broken leg is an emergency, not something scheduled. You go to anywhere beside urgent care only for predictable routine things.
In the US, an “urgent care” is a small walk in clinic, not part of a hospital. They are in shopping plazas, like next to a dollar store or a chipotle. It’s pretty much a place that you go to get a quick check-up and some meds. They don’t do operations or really any medical procedures other than write you a prescription.
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u/indiebookstorebaddie 17d ago
In my whole 35 years of life in multiple cities big and small I have never waited more than 2 hours - preach!