It's embarassing to be an ER doc. A patient will wait over eight hours to see me. Madness! Here is why: When I come on a 4pm there are twelve beds at my disposal. But four are locked up with patients who are admitted and waiting for a bed in the hospital. Now, there are beds available...there just aren't nurses to cover them. And because of the strict nursing ratios won by the nursing union, there is no felxibility even for the short term. and because the nursing managers are drawn from the ranks of nurses and have primary loyalty to the nurses all sorts of nonsense goes on up there--a bed can be kept empty for eight hours at a stretch by a nurse who knows how to play the game right. Shameful. Whatever--the result is shitty patient carfe in the ED. And the CT scanner has one guy in it to service 30 ER beds as well as the whole hospital. We're staffed for the average patient load--we're grossly inadequate for the above avrage lload which, by definition (almost) occurs half the time. In the meantime I have two drig seekers, one Hewroin addict and two illegal Mexican immigrants in the other beds. I'm running a 3 bed ED for everyone else. What can I do to compensate for making a patient wait eight hours in pain? Nothing. And yet my performance will be measured on how satisfied those poor patients are. Satisfied?! They should be in rebellion! No system like this should ever have been allowed to come to pass. And yet it has. The poor patient patients get shit on by nurses unions, the hospitals, the politicians, etc. and they just accept the abuse. Madness! Absolute madness. U-561