Dave Peterson, 72, of Blaine arrived at the United ER at 10:30 a.m. Thursday, complaining of numbness in one hand, a possible stroke symptom. He didn’t get to a room in the ER until almost 3 p.m., but by then he had received a blood test and an imaging scan that confirmed he had a mild stroke because of a blood clot.
“It’s been busy,” Peterson said, “and you just wait your turn because there’s a lot of people here and most of them are worse than I am.”
Peterson admitted it felt weird to receive medical care in a triage room and then be shuttled back among other patients in the waiting room. His daughter helped an older woman next to her by putting her feet up in her wheelchair and putting padding behind her back.
Previously, though, “they probably would have been waiting for four and a half hours before anything happened,” Echols said.
The logjam upstream in hospitals remains part of the problem. Thirty of the 40 patients in the United ER, including Peterson, were waiting for inpatient beds to open upstairs in the hospital.
Influenza outbreaks in 14 long-term care facilities in Minnesota last week won’t help. That was an increase from eight outbreaks the prior week. Nursing homes often lose workers to illness during outbreaks, which means they can’t take as many patients when they are ready to be discharged from hospitals. That in turn keeps inpatient hospital beds occupied, which clogs up the emergency rooms.
