Syracuse, N.Y. – A Syracuse man who went to Upstate University Hospital’s emergency room last month with severe stomach pain says he waited a total of 16 hours without ever seeing a doctor.
Alan Schnall, 52, said the crowded ER waiting room was dirty and had blood on the floor. “It was horrible. I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said.
ER wait times at Upstate and other Syracuse hospitals have been longer than usual lately because of a chronic nursing shortage coupled with a surge of patients with Covid-19 and other illnesses. Local ERs were so backed up during the summer they set a record for how often they temporarily shut their doors to ambulance patients.
Upstate’s ER gets so overcrowded at times the hospital has been considering using an outdoor tent to temporarily handle patients arriving by ambulance.
“We regret that Mr. Schnall did not have a good experience in the emergency department during his visit,” Darryl Geddes, an Upstate official, said in a statement.
Hospital records show 119 people signed into the ER the day Schnall was there. The average wait that day was 2 ½ hours, but some patients had to wait as long as 14 hours to be seen by a doctor.
Schnall’s time in the ER actually played out over two visits. After waiting eight hours, he said he left, came back an hour later and waited another eight hours.
The average time nationally that patients spend in ERs before leaving is just under three hours, according to the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Schnall said he arrived at Upstate’s ER at about 11:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 17 with a bloated stomach, severe abdominal pain, vomiting and diarrhea.
He had previously undergone intestinal surgery for diverticulitis. Schnall feared he might have an infection and need emergency surgery.
When patients arrive at an ER, they are triaged. That process determines which patients are the sickest and need to be seen first. Schnall said after being triaged he was told he’d be near the top of the list.
But Schnall said eight hours later, at about 7:30 a.m. Saturday, he was still waiting.
“Nobody as sick as I was should have to wait that long,” he said. “I was so dizzy at one point I thought I was going to pass out.”
Schnall wanted to lie down but there was no place to do that in the ER. So Schnall, an antiques dealer, left the ER and took a Lyft to his office on Cambridge Street in the Westcott area to lie down. He said he returned to the ER about an hour later at 8:30 a.m. and had to go through the triage process all over again.
Although Schnall didn’t realize it at the time, his decision to leave the ER and come back made his wait even longer.
That’s because patients who do that have to go through the triage process all over again. Their wait is recalculated based on the severity of illness of patients in the ER at the time they return, not when they first arrived.
Schnall said ER staff told him he was kept waiting because he did not have a fever.
He waited another eight hours until about 4:30 p.m. when he gave up and left.
Schnall then went to the ER at St. Joseph’s where he said he was seen by medical staff within an hour. Schnall said they determined he did not have an infection, but a stomach hernia which temporarily caused his pain.
Schnall said St. Joe’s referred him to a surgeon for a sonogram. He expects he will need surgery.
Geddes said ER wait times can be “higher than we would expect under ideal conditions” because of the Covid-19 pandemic and staff shortages.
He also said conditions in the ER “should always be up to the highest standards of cleanliness.”
But Geddes acknowledged there could occasionally be blood on the floor of the ER waiting room because Upstate is the region’s level 1 trauma center that cares for seriously injured patients.
During his wait, Schnall said he witnessed “the most God-awful conditions I’ve ever seen.”
James T. Mulder covers health and higher education. Have a news tip? Contact him at (315) 470-2245 or jmulder@syracuse.com
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October 25, 2021 at 04:58PM
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16 hours in Syracuse hospital ER: 'Nobody as sick as I was should have to wait that long' - syracuse.com
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