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SRO1911 wrote: ↑Sun Aug 11, 2019 10:37 am

03Lightningrocks wrote: ↑Sun Aug 11, 2019 7:47 am
The way I understand it is they give priority based on how life threatening the issue is. Who makes that decision may have been the problem with the person bleeding profusely. I also know an ambulance ride will get you right in but then you get to pay another 700-800 bucks for the ambulance.

Triage determines how fast you get in.
A lot of people seem to think that an ambulance is a fast pass to be seen, but we have rolled many patients in through the back door who clearly did not need emergent care - and the triage nurse walks them to the waiting room.
I just finished a week of clinicals in Houston, 6 days on 911 trucks running into 4 different hospitals, although that's just a fraction of the ER options - every one of them works the same, just like ours back home. And every one of them was over crowded with people who absolutely did not need to be in an emergency room. A walk in clinic or PCP would have been faster and cheaper.

I have always thought part of the problem is the people who are not actually in need of emergency care. I have always heard they use emergency rooms because they cannot be denied care at the emergency room.

philip964 wrote: ↑Sat Aug 10, 2019 11:06 pm My recent experience with Houston ER’s has been less than satisfactory.

Apparently there is also some law that prevents an ER from telling you over the phone if there will be a long wait.

I have also been told that in many cases the people who are receiving the attention are homeless people “who know their rights”.

I had a Houston Police Officer who was providing armed security at the Med Center ER I was at, kindly suggest to me after an hour of seeing my son in extreme pain from a kidney stone, that a suburban hospital ER was only a 30 minute drive away and that would be far quicker than continuing to wait where I was.

We took his advice, but even when we got there and I asked if there would be a long wait “we cannot give out that information” . But they ended up seeing him immediately.

And we don’t even have socialized medicine yet.

The way I understand it is they give priority based on how life threatening the issue is. Who makes that decision may have been the problem with the person bleeding profusely. I also know an ambulance ride will get you right in but then you get to pay another 700-800 bucks for the ambulance.

My experience here in Plano several years ago. I was having sharp pains in the center of my back. I was around fifty at the time. As soon as I told them my symptoms, they took me right in ahead of several people sitting in the waiting room. I guess potential heart attack rates pretty high. Turned out to be a different issue with nerve damage from collapsed discs in my neck. Once they determined my heart was not the issue, I laid in that emergency room for several hours waiting for an MRI of my neck. They even moved me to a different cubicle where the tummy ache crowd was waiting.