Emergency Department Boarding Stories

"This ED had 30 rooms with beds, as well as five hallway beds. On any given day, I would come in for night shift at 21:00, with three rooms to work out of, the other 27 would have boarding patients in them, and several of them were critical ICU patients. The would be no available hall beds to work out of, and 45 patients in the waiting room to be seen. Sometimes, you would have patients having heart attacks or blood clots in their lungs in the waiting room, because the boarding patients in the beds would be sicker, and we wouldn't be able to treat them because we didn't have monitoring equipment, or enough nurses to care for them."