It's Called the Emergency Room For a Reason!

Okay, so I work security at a metro Vancouver area hospital (which one is unimportant) and it never ceases to amaze me how many people bring themselves, family members, or friends into the Emergency Room without genuine medical emergencies. I would go so far as to say that at least 80% of people who are admitted through the triage area are wasting valuable healthcare resources, as they have problems that could be far more effectively dealt with by scheduling an appointment with their family doctors in a day or two.

A few nights ago, at around three in the morning, I'm playing solitaire and listening to 80s music in the office, and a middle aged Asian woman rushes up to the door carrying her small child. I buzz her in, and she runs to me with a frantic look on her face. I ask her the same question I ask every other person who comes in through the ER triage area: "are you here to see a doctor?" She says that she is, and I instruct her to sit down in the waiting room like every other patient and wait for the nurse to begin the admitting process. Because there was no one else in the triage area so early in the morning, they saw the triage nurse straight away. Since my office is right next to the nursing station, I had to struggle not to laugh my ass off as I overheard the mother describe her son's scraped knee to the nurse, followed by the nurse repeating over and over that this was not the kind of thing you visit the hospital for.

The nurse couldn't just send them home, as any refusal of healthcare, no matter how absurd the problem, is illegal. I can only imagine how angry the mother would have been had she brought her son in during the day with a papercut only to wait twelve hours until all patients with real health problems were done with.

Such an extreme example of wasting healthcare resources (and by extension, my tax dollars) is relatively rare. More typical wastes of our time constitute things such as a fever, flu, minor skin irritations, one or two instances of vomiting in a 24 hour period, etc. And then these people sometimes get angry when they're bumped down the queue by someone brought in with an actual, real medical emergency. I've even seen triage patients with non-emergencies get pissed off when staff were called away to deal with an episode of cardiac arrest in the ER itself (don't worry, the guy lived). Do these genuises not understand the concept of a triage?

Remember what it's called? The Emergency Room. Based on that label, I'm going to let you figure out what it's supposed to be for.

If this is the kind of shit we have to deal with at my hospital, I can only imagine what those poor people at Vancouver General go through every night.