Forum: Hospital waiting rooms shouldn't be patient warehouses [View all]
By Shari Berg / Herald Forum
As I write this, an 89-year-old woman is sitting in the emergency waiting room at Providence Regional Medical Center Everett.
She is uncomfortable and cannot have her family around her. She was brought in by ambulance with possible internal bleeding. She was told to go to the emergency room by her doctor after having been monitored by the Dispatch Health team while at home. It is midnight and she has been waiting for a room for almost seven hours since she arrived. She was given an IV and is being monitored, but the emergency room is so busy and the hospital is so short-staffed, that no one can say when she’ll get a room and care. This woman is my mom.
Security guards at the hospital will not allow family to be with the patient until they are in a room. Rooms are not available on the floors, so patients sit in the emergency department and sometimes never get into a different area of the hospital. This means that new patients coming in cannot get a room and must be treated in the waiting area.
Our hospital systems are failing. This is happening all over the country. Providence’s new building seems obsolete before it was even finished being built. Between population increases in the area and the increase in drug overdoses, among other strains on the system, there is just not enough room for all the patients needing help on a daily basis. During covid, nurses left the hospitals and went on to other jobs. Pay is not keeping up with the demand and stress is put on the nurses who did stay. Providence needs more money, more doctors, more nurses and more room to grow. It is only going to get worse.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/forum-hospital-waiting-rooms-shouldnt-be-patient-warehouses/
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