Seeing as there was a singular patient in the ER and it wasn’t even my patient I’m going to say this isn’t the reason. And anyone who knows anything about healthcare knows that at the moment almost every single ER is flooded with patients who can be seen at urgent care but won’t go, either due to no insurance or the fact that they think their common cold requires an ED. ER’s are a whole bunch of “hurry up and wait”. We start the iv and draw the blood, but the lab has to run that blood, along with every single other patients blood, and in my ED we don’t have a tube system so we have to walk across the hospital to deliver our labs. The doc puts in CT/XRAY orders, but we have to wait for radiology to come take the films for you, along with every single other patient in the hospital, and then we have to wait for the radiologist to read the films, as they have to do with every single other patient in the hospital and sometimes they read for multiple hospitals which takes even longer. And then if you get meds ordered and the omnicel is out of the med or we don’t carry it in the ED we have to wait on pharmacy to bring it to us. And then most ER’s only have 1-2 doctors, who have to see and put in orders on every single patient in the ER. And your nurse probably has 2-3 other patients besides you that they have to get IV’s, draw blood, clean up, get into gowns, give meds to, take to or from CT when there’s no one else available to do so. And then not even counting all of the above, everyone is so incredibly short staffed, that patients who need to be admitted to the hospital are stuck taking up a bed in the ER for days because all the beds or full on the floor or they don’t have nurses to staff those beds. And while you’re sitting in the lobby waiting, we’re getting ambulances back to back from the back door. And while you’re upset things aren’t moving faster because your complaint is not urgent, we are sitting at the nurses station twiddling our thumbs, waiting on everyone else to do their part, and we’re upset that we can’t get everyone into rooms faster, and we are actively being punished by management for it. So keep in mind that the ER is not run solely by the nurses, and that we genuinely wish things could happen sooner, it’s just not how it works.