Crowded Triangle emergency rooms mean it may take longer for ambulances to arrive

In other parts of the country, as COVID-19 overwhelms hospital capacity, patients are reportedly having to wait in ambulances for space to open up in emergency rooms.

EMS leaders in Wake, Durham and Orange Counties said while that's not the case in the Triangle, they all agreed it's taking longer to transfer patients into increasingly crowded hospitals.

The impact is highest in Wake County, where EMS responded to a record-breaking 10,000 calls in May, and has set new, higher records each month this summer, according to Wake County EMS Assistant Chief Brian Brooks.

Brooks said average time it takes to check a patient into the ER and get back out on the road used to be between five and 15 minutes. Because ERs are so crowded, it now takes 45 minutes.

Brooks stressed that true emergencies are still rushed back into the ER. But for non-emergent patients, if a bed isn't available, the paramedics may have to wait with them. Sometimes, paramedics wait with patients in a hallway until paperwork can be completed to transfer care to the hospital.

"We’ve had times up to two hours on several occasions last week, but that’s not a normal occurrence," Brooks said. "It certainly trickles down to the streets, because those units are now tied up in the hospital and not able to answer the next emergency call that comes up."

In Durham, the turnaround time for EMS crews has increased by 5 to 10 minutes.

In one case this week, it took three hours to transfer a patient into Duke Regional, but Durham Chief Paramedic Mark Lockhart said that's an outlier.

"Duke put up some tents outside of their emergency department at the main hospital a few weeks ago to handle the overflow from the emergency department," he said. "We’ve had some extended wait times, but really, those have been very isolated incidents, that are more a function of the capacity and the ability of the ER at that given time.”

In some cases, though, Lockhart said non-emergent patients are having to be transferred to a waiting area, rather than a bed.

The same thing is happening In Orange County, Emergency Services Director Kirby Saunders told WRAL News. He said ER crowding has lengthened turnaround times there by about three minutes.

Saunders said their biggest challenge is the "tremendous increase" in calls to 911, often for "low-acuity," less urgent problems.

"We have seen about a 27% increase in call volume since the pre-pandemic numbers," Saunders said. "We don’t have any concrete evidence to say exactly why we are seeing that large increase in call volume."

"We suspect that it has a lot to do with healthcare in general being overwhelmed," he added. "We know that healthcare in general is taxed pretty heavily right now from the pandemic and the surge with the delta variant."

All three officials stressed that anyone with a medical emergency should still call 911, and they will be taken care in the ER. You should also call if you think you may be having an emergency, but you're not sure.

If it's not an emergency situation, Saunders said, you may still end up in the waiting room, even if you arrive in an ambulance.

"Don’t do it if you just think it’s going to get you seen quicker," he said. "That is a common misconception, a common myth, that if you come by ambulance you’ll get seen quicker. And that is not the case at all."

"We are doing the best we can with what we have," Durham's Lockhart agreed. "A lot of this depends on folks recognizing when they need to go to the emergency department versus their personal physician or an urgent care.”