Thanks, CNN! This is totally what people need to know!
How to be an entitled asshole in the ER: A special report by CNNRemember, folks, if you successfully line jump after triage, you're shoving in front of someone a medical professional has already determined to be in more serious condition than you are
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(the only time I have ever made trouble in an ER was when they had overflow and put me and my not seriously ill child and another mom and her very very seriously ill child in the hall outside a man who presumably had active TB and kept wandering out of his containment room and coughing on us) but yeah, if I thought that the staff was blowing me off, or just too overworked, or if I thought being in the ER was itself a risk
Those are all reasonable situations in which to make a fuss- if you've really been misordered in the wait and it's blazingly obvious, if the patient's condition changes while waiting, if you have a reasonable expectation that your child is in imminent danger, yeah, say something. Loudly.
But the situation described in this article? Not reasonable. It sounds like the triage nurse correctly assessed that the guy was not having a serious allergic reaction (if Benadryl was all it took, and then they sent him home, that was basically a thank you for coming prize, and totally something he could have tried before coming in- and his friend throwing a hissy fit just pushed his hives ahead of whoever actually was having more serious problems that day).
Telling people that they should just follow their instincts and make a scene because they think they're the most important the wait is too long is crappy advice because most people's instincts about the seriousness of their illness are really bad- and they're also completely missing the critical information about who they're competing with for medical attention. Obviously, virtually everyone in the ER thinks they're having an emergency- but a lot of them are wrong. When people tell me about how they waited ten or twelve hours to be seen and the story doesn't end with "And it turned out to be bacterial meningitis!" or "And they whisked me off to surgery right then!" it basically means they went to the ER for something they didn't actually need to. And yes, there are definitely situations where a reasonable person can believe they need emergency care and turn out not to, but the fact that they sought it, waited ten hours, and were ultimately okay basically means the system is working, within the constraints of patient volume placed on it, the way it's supposed to. It sucks, but encouraging people to reorder triage in order from most obnoxious to least obnoxious is only going to lead to tragedy.
What makes me so angry about it is not that it's annoying to the staff, it's that behavior like this further strains the already strained-to-the-max triage system, and endangers the lives of people who aren't total jerks.
. I think this is a preview of the tsunami of rage that is going to hit when normal middle class people, who have feelings of entitlement to things like cleanliness, order, and sanity, are shunted into systems that have spent the last two decades being warped by the kinds of assholes who don't get anything done but make a big mess, and the whole horrorshow might teach people why market forces are a better way to organize nearly everything, but I doubt it.
Unfortunately, I agree on both counts.
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