Credit: Melina Barris

While most people survive each day avoiding an urgent trip to the emergency room, having it there for emergency situations is critical for safety, but how safe are they really? “Everyone is suffering, both the patients as well as the medical professionals trying to make things better,” Emergency Physician Melisa Poulos said.

An excruciating pain arises in your ankle after you tripped and fell while on your two mile run. By the time you reach the hospital, a throbbing sensation presents itself and the agony only heightens. As you speak to the person at the front desk, they tell you that the wait time will be about 20 to 30 minutes. However, the next time you check the clock, you realize an hour has passed by. As the hour turns into two, your patience begins to dwindle, and you start to feel light headed from the pain. Soon later, you hear the long awaited words of “they’re ready to see you.”

According to Emergency Physician Melisa Poulos, depending on the number of patients, the maximum wait time to be admitted into the inpatient part of the hospital can be up to 24 hours. Despite how long a person may be waiting, if someone with a worse condition enters the waiting room, the hospital will take them first.

“We tell people when they walk through the front door, your average stay as an ER patient is going to be between four and six hours,” Poulos said. “If you need to get admitted, you literally can be waiting two hours or you could be waiting 24 hours.”

Serious conditions such as any bodily infection, inflamed organs or serious head injuries have the possibility of worsening during the time the patient is waiting to be seen. Because of the limited number of beds, some patients who enter the hospital on stretchers have to remain on stretchers because there is no space for them to be evaluated. According to both Massachusetts General Hospital and Poulos, there will be patients on stretchers in the hallways of the hospitals.

“I’m part of private groups of just emergency physicians, but they’re from all over the world,” Poulos said. “This theme of overcrowding, the boarding and bad outcomes [is a] very commonly shared concern over the past three or four years.”

While sitting in the hallway as opposed to a room may not seem like a prominent concern for someone who is in need of urgent medical assistance, there are several risks. When in an enclosed hospital room, even while sharing a room with another patient, you are theoretically more protected from germs and bacteria that can contaminate your body. If a person was in the hospital with an immune deficiency, they could be more susceptible to contracting different illnesses and could worsen their physical health.

Junior Erica Wilson experienced a similar situation when she felt a pain in her lower abdomen and rushed to the emergency room. When she arrived, she waited for about an hour and stayed at the hospital from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., receiving a number of tests. While waiting for her test results, Wilson was placed in the hallway on a stretcher and not in a room.

“I was given medication for the pain, but it was still pretty bad, and the risk of me contracting an illness was higher because I was in the hallway and not a room, so I was exposed to everything,” Wilson said.

Throughout the nation, both patients and medical workers struggle with the inpatient system while hospitals are at overcapacity. When a hospital is overcapacity, the medical staff scramble in trying to serve every patient thoroughly, while also ensuring that people in the waiting room can be evaluated as soon as possible. According to Massachusetts General Hospital, there was a 32% increase in the amount of time patients are spending in the hospital from 2022 to 2023, which is a significant change in comparison to other years.

“[This situation] adds stress to [medical workers] because you’re balancing this pressure,” Poulos said. “There’s an entire waiting room of people that don’t feel well, [and who] may have something serious going on. Even if they don’t have anything life threatening, [they feel] poorly enough to come to the emergency department and sit there and wait to be seen. You’re constantly feeling stressed about trying to move things more quickly.”

As a patient, it may seem that the medical workers are the ones with the lack of efficiency, however, it is out of their control because people’s admittance is based on the status of the hospital’s capacity. For Poulos, the relationships she creates while in the room with the patients is important in showing them that she cares and understands that waiting can be frustrating.

“What I’ve learned, especially in these times of things being over capacity and over stressed, is that I just have to make much more of an effort to help them feel like I care,” Poulos said. “I want to try to make them feel better, and I’m going to try my best to get to the bottom of what’s causing their symptoms and make sure they’re safe. [This] can be hard to do because you’re very mindful of the fact that there’s still a whole waiting room of 30 more of those people just like this poor person right in front of you.”

On top of the hospitals being over capacity, there has been a national nursing shortage. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the number of nurses to patients is about nine nurses to 1,000 patients, leading to the closure of some hospitals.

According to Paulos, the real issue behind the lack of available beds for patients doesn’t necessarily have to do with the quantity of beds in the hospital. Instead, she claims that it is the lack of nurses and understaffed shifts that cause the backup. While patients are still being treated, they are stripped of the solace of having privacy and more comfort when waiting to be seen.

“I think getting into a room would be better than sitting out in the waiting room where everybody’s kind of looking at you,” WHS librarian Jennifer McGillis said. “[It] would make people more comfortable.”

As a solution to some of these issues, there are systems being put in place, such as home visits, to not only open up beds for people, but keep people in the comfort of their homes. Some medical institutions, like Boston Medical Center, have started a program called “Hospital at Home,” where they send their medical personnel to homes for people who need medical care.

“I know that there’s quite an initiative to develop different models that basically bring in more intensive medical care to patients’ homes,” Poulos said. “Obviously there’s a lot of effort to screen and select the patients that this would be most appropriate for, but it’s an up and coming field, I think, as looking at different ways to deliver care that patients need that keeps them out of the hospital or maybe has their length of stay in the hospital be a little bit shorter.”