They have been triaged by the emergency team and are waiting to be admitted to the hospital for further treatment. But there's no room in the intensive care unit, no room on the medical floor. One patient with pneumonia has been waiting a day and a half to get out of the ER and into a hospital bed. They can't be sent home because they're too sick. They can't be moved to an inpatient unit because the hospital is full.
Emergency rooms are on the critical list nationwide.
In a survey of 575 emergency room directors, more than 90 percent reported overcrowding as a problem, according to a study by researchers at the University of California's Davis Medical Center published in a recent issue of Academic Emergency Medicine. In the typical scenario, hallways are packed with boarders, waiting rooms are full of the sick and injured and ambulances are diverted to other facilities because there is no doctor, no nurse, no inch of space available to deal with another patient. The situation is acute in all types of hospitals academic, public and private in urban and rural areas. The presence of boarders in ER hallways is the latest symbol of a broken-down health care system. Emergency rooms have been in crisis before.