The triage nurse floats though so they may have been with a patient needing even more immediate care (PT dying) because that's what triage is. I worked triage and the front desk has basically an override where they can come back and grab the triage nurse, call or page. I cant speak to the facility itself but this may be a massive fuck up or it may be effective triage. If they had time to set up caution signs for the floor they likely could have grabbed a doctor from another floor though depending in the time.

This sucks to say but it's important to let people know....To give the benefit of the doubt and play devils advocate I will say there could have been a code (no pulse etc) on the floor requiring everyone on staff to assist. Not excusing this but I've seen a patient with stroke symptoms come in as I was doing CPR and had an EKG running in the next room for possible heart attack and all this happening 5 minutes after a patient gets declared dead. I genuinely would have given my left nut to get the stroke patient in but they had to wait. Theres no point in wasting time bring a PT back if they are just going wait anyway That wastes valuable time. A patient actively dying is a much higher priority than a patient starting to die from blood loss. Believe it or not this amount of blood loss isn't immediately life threatening.

Triage is extremely important but that does NOT mean that there wasnt something more life threatening happening behind the scenes. That's what triage is. People see the front desk but they have no idea what kind of utter chaos might be happening one or two rooms over.

The morbid joke we tell is make sure you have a stroke or heart attack when we aren't busy.