Quote:
Originally Posted by gatherer47
I'll stand by my original statement-an eleven hour wait for a sick child is totally unacceptable
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Of course it is. You were a 90 minute drive from Tampa, which has many 24 hour urgent care facilities as well as three major Hospital Systems (Tampa General, St. Joseph's and Florida Hospital) which each has multiple locations. Your chances of being seen sooner might have been improved in Tampa. Some phone calls may have paved the way.
However, it has been my experience that all three hospital ERs become swamped at night, worse on weekends, by indigent patients.
My most recent experience at TVRH, arriving at 6PM with a friend awaiting admission, was sitting in the ER waiting room for three hours to see the Triage Nurse and not getting back to a treatment room until around 2AM, and then the friend was admitted the next morning when a current patient checked out. And this was with a referral from a doctor at Urgent Care for admission.
The ER problem at TVRH is bad, but it is characteristic of similar problems elsewhere and does not qualify as "a black eye" on TV.