Recently I have seen a few roadside billboards advertising an interesting hospital service.  If you visit a website, or text their server, you can find out how long the current wait time is at the ER!  Wow!

But then, this is “Inane World”, not “Cool Stuff Tim Noticed”.  So as you might expect, I think that is quite inane, and have a real fundamental problem with it.  I would hope you do too.  You see, this is for the ER (Emergency Room).  Let’s examine that more closely for a minute.  An Emergency is defined an “event or situation posing an immediate threat to life and limb”.  If you can review the wait time and decide whether and when to go, then it’s not an emergency, is it?  If you are bleeding to death, have severe burns or broken bones, or were brought in on an ambulance gurney, you won’t be able to decide whether to go now or in an hour from now, but you WILL care about having to wait because the beleaguered ER staff is wasting their time treating non-emergency cases.

Get a clue, people!  If it’s not an emergency, make an appointment with your doctor (primary care physician).  The rest of us really don’t want to be paying higher healthcare insurance costs just because your kid has the sniffles and like an idiot, you brought him to the ER (which we all end up paying for).

I can count on one hand the number of times I have been in the ER over the last 45 years as a patient.  I think it’s something like 2 or maybe 3 (given that my ancient brain cells are occasionally unreliable at cataloguing such things).  My parents “got” the idea that the ER was for emergencies.  As a result, I view it the same way, and if I have a non-emergency problem it would never dawn on me to go there!