Why YSK: If you’re injured or ill but it’s not life or limb threatening and you decide to call an ambulance thinking it’ll be faster and you’ll be seen first… WRONG. Ambulance crews very frequently will advise the hospital staff that you “can wait”. Then we’ll plop you into a wheel chair and push you into the waiting room with everyone else.
this seems quite country specific. Care sharing which one?
Triage is common throughout the world. I don’t believe anywhere will ambulance service automatically get you seen sooner.
i think you could be surprised how different things can function in a country different than the US. Especially the medical system. So it could be interesting to have that conversation. I work in the medical field but nowhere near a hospital so can’t bring much
I’ve had to take ambulances many times in my country, and it’s the same here. Triage is triage, I would be shocked if it worked differently… anywhere. If ambulances got you seen faster, it would be at the expense of someone who needed treatment more, and that’s bad from both a healthcare perspective (you will save fewer patients) and a financial perspective (dead patients don’t pay).
That’s fair and logical arguments. But I guess you are already kind of treated in the ambulance, and if it’s not long to finish treating you fully after that, would they do it so they can dismiss you and focus on the rest of the patients?
Ambulances don’t really “treat” you, except in the simplest of cases. A paramedic/EMT is not a doctor. Their training is largely in stabilizing you, that is, making sure you don’t die before you get to the hospital, where you enter the triage system. They haven’t treated you, they’ve only done their best to keep the problem from getting worse. (I’m not saying this isn’t a valuable skill, just that it’s not the same as “kind of treating” you)
My experience dealing with healthcare, ambulances and hospitals in Canada.
No matter how you get to the hospital, ambulance, driving yourself, taking a cab, etc. When you get there, a triage attendant will check your condition for severity. If you have something that can kill you quickly (abnormal heart rate, extreme high or low blood pressure, signs of a stroke, difficulty breathing), uncontrollable bleeding, some sort of penetrating injury (shot, stabbed, impaled, etc) they’ll bring you in immediately.
If it’s something not as critical (broken appendage, bleeding which can be controlled by pressure, etc., unspecified pain), you’re going to wait until anyone in the first category has been taken care of first.
Count your blessings if you have to wait, it means whatever you have is not that bad. May be in a lot of pain and otherwise suck, but it’s probably not life threatening.
When I went to a hospital with a heart arrhythmia, they didn’t break stride as they brought me in and hooked me up to many machines to monitor everything. That’s an “oh, crap!” moment. I’d much rather be told I had to wait for a bit, means it’s not too bad, and I can keep occupied as long as my phone battery holds-out.
At least in Canada, it will be cheap, if not totally free. Had heart surgery that would’ve cost $80,000k in the US. In Canada? I complained about paying for parking for the day.
