If you have visited a hospital emergency room, you've probably experienced a wait. But I'll bet it wasn't as long as the time I rushed my husband, John, to the hospital. It was a Monday night last July. John is a cardiac patient, and he was having neck and jaw pain. That visit, which stretched to more than eight hours, inspired our investigative unit at WBAL to examine ER waiting times using freely available data from a Maryland state agency.
Shortly after I got John to Northwest Hospital outside Baltimore, he was called to the triage unit where they checked his vital signs and determined he could wait. So they sent him back to the waiting room with dozens of other sick-looking patients. After about an hour, he still had not seen a doctor; that's when a nurse announced there would be a six-hour delay. I said, 'I'll take him to Sinai Hospital.' She said, 'Sinai is on an eleven-hour delay.' I couldn't believe it.
There didn't seem to be any option but to wait, and it gave me lots of time to wonder what's going on inside Baltimore ERs...