Community Corner

Hospital Offers ER Wait Time For Non-Life-Threatening Injuries

Patients of Middlesex Hospital in Middletown, Essex and Marlborough can check the web to see the actual wait time to see a doctor in the emergency room.

 

It’s Sunday afternoon and you slipped while playing football and think you might have sprained your ankle. You’ve got a choice: wait until Monday to call your doctor or head over to the emergency room and wait quite possibly hours for an x-ray.

Anyone who has been to the emergency room knows there’s an electric sign that displays the expected wait time for patients with non-life-threatening injuries.

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It’s a handy resource, one I found vaguely comforting when I dislocated my shoulder last December. In a mostly empty ER waiting room, I wondered how long exactly a patient should sit patiently before asking if perhaps they’ve been forgotten.

I didn't need to worry. My name was called shortly and treatment was swift, professional and comforting.

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Now Middlesex Hospital offers that same service on its home page, updated every five minutes. Wait times for Middlesex, the Shoreline Medical Center in Essex and Marlborough Medical Center are displayed.

The current waiting time, according to the website, is the length of time from registration to having a physician assigned to the case.  “We like to refer to this as our ‘door-to-doc’ time. … Patients who arrive with life threatening and more serious injuries and ailments are seen before those with non-life threatening problems.”

All three of the hospital’s ERs offer Express Care for patients who have injuries and ailments that need to be treated, but are not very serious or life threatening, according to the website.

To see the current ER wait times see here.

 

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