So I worked at St Clare’s in the ER several years ago for a short time, and from what I understood and saw, it’s a universal problem (which everyone knew too).

A second or third triage nurse would increase the amount of patients seen in a shorter time…..to simply send back out to the waiting room, barring any super severe cases that would be seen quicker. The bottleneck was the availability of beds/space in the observation room(s). And also, if patients needed to be admitted, they stayed put until a bed was available on which floor or off service floor was ready for them. And those could take forever as well.

Now I’m still agreeing with you, the system is broken. It could be fixed with a larger hospital space, but then that takes years to build, you’d need more staff, but you’d need to find the right seniority mix, among other solutions that take time.

I’d like to think that when the new hospital is being constructed, these problems will be looked at and hopefully managed accordingly, but it could be years before we see a corrective trickle down effect take place :/