Emergency Department Boarding Stories

"We operate in a busy suburban setting. Every room is typically full at any given hour. We typically walk into night shift at 7pm with 20-40 people in the waiting room who have been there for hours. There are often 12 or more patient in hallway beds, which typically do not have monitoring and do not have assigned nurses. It was early in the morning, one of our patients had been in the department for 12.5 hours in one of these hallway beds. Some patients had been waiting 14 hours in the waiting room and hadn't been seen by a physician. I received a frantic call from one of our ED techs about a patient that "didn't look good" in a hallway bed - this patient went into cardiac arrest. The emergency department is in crisis - something has to be done."