Three and a half years ago I experienced first hand the situation about which this blogpost is written. The situation was bad in February, 2023, and apparently it’s worse, now. I’m talking about crowded hospitals with occupancies at or beyond capacity which necessitates patients needing hospital admission to be housed in the emergency department.
That February, 2023, I developed severe lymphedema of my legs that ultimately developed into cellulitis, or infection in the soft tissues. I had so much edema that lymph fluid was seeping through my skin leaving pools of fluid around my feet. The cellulitis was painful and getting worse. I went to the ER at Honor Thompson Peak thinking I needed either IV antibiotics and/or admission to the hospital.
The ER waiting room was packed, and I noticed patients weren’t being called back into the ER with any frequency. They, and I, were waiting. In fact, I waited 6 hours before being called to a room in the ER. There are 20 “beds” in the emergency department. Nineteen of those were occupied by patients waiting to be admitted to the hospital. The one vacant bed in the ER was being used to see patients. It finally became my turn. After it was decided I needed to be admitted, I spent another 18 hours on a gurney in the ER waiting for a bed to vacate.
The crisis I and many others had been caught up in is, instead of being admitted to a hospital room, I was “boarded” in a “room” in the ER. That “room” could be a real, 4-walls, room, but it could also be an area sectioned off by curtains, or it may be the ER hallway on a gurney. Hospital admissions are more than the bed count will hold. The overflow has to go somewhere and the ER is the most practical place.
Patients are being held in the ER for days, weeks, or months. Due to an aging American public and the relinquishing of responsibility for the ambulatory after-hours care of patients by primary care physicians, the volume of patients treated by the ER exceeds the capacity to house them. This overcapacity/overcrowding leads to ER physicians discontent as well as disgruntled employees.
There’s no simple solution. Hiring more employees is one option as is building more hospital rooms. But that’s very expensive and takes years to accomplish. Having a healthier population that doesn’t use the ER is another possibility, but that’s not realistic. Patience from both caregivers and patients is the only current answer while innovative minds work on a credible solution.
Still, when you make the emergency room you family doctor, there will be uncertainty and inefficiency. Along with that you must be patient because you know you’re going to spend a lot of time waiting. You know it’s a problem when a national medical news outlet considers it serious enough to write a major article about it.
There’s nothing more frustrating than a long, boring wait in the ER waiting room when you feel sick or are in pain. Hopefully some solution will be forthcoming.
Reference: Hochwald L. Inside the Growing Emergency Department (ED) Boarding Crisis. medscape.com 2026 July 22.
