A recent survey of PeaceHealth patients reveals that an overwhelming majority have experienced what they consider excessive wait times and unacceptable conditions.
The Oregon Nurses Association and Pacific Northwest Hospital Medical Association released the survey results last Thursday, showing that 97% of PeaceHealth patients reported negative experiences since the closure of PeaceHealth’s University District emergency room.
The University District location closure aimed to consolidate staff at PeaceHealth RiverBend Medical Center and cut costs. However, some patients cited wait times and insufficient time with health care providers as their most significant complaints.
Bruk Esayas, a junior at the University of Oregon, shared his experience at RiverBend.
“I visited RiverBend with an extreme case of tonsillitis,” Esayas said. “When I arrived at 10 p.m., I was told there would be a bit of a wait. The emergency room was filthy, extremely disorganized and smelled terrible. After getting my diagnostics taken, I waited for three hours before going to the front desk to stress that I was in extreme pain and on the verge of passing out.”
Esayas said he begged for acetaminophen or ibuprofen but was denied.
“They said, verbatim, ‘You are one of the next guests to be seen by a doctor.’ That calmed me down, so I sat back down. Five more hours passed, and it was 6 a.m. After waiting for nine hours and continuously seeing people come in, get help and leave, I left the hospital without receiving any treatment.”
Seventy percent of survey respondents reported long wait times, with some claiming waits of over eight hours, similar to Esayas’ experience. More than half struggled to secure appointments, with some waiting as long as six months. Fifty percent of respondents also said they felt they had insufficient time with their healthcare providers.
The delay in addressing RiverBend’s rising wait times appears tied to the way PeaceHealth measures wait times versus how patients perceive them.
During a public meeting addressing the survey results last week, Dr. Charlotte Yeomans, a PeaceHealth hospitalist and PNHMA president, explained the disparity.
“[PeaceHealth] only looks at the moment between when the patient was registered and the moment a triage nurse talks to them or pulls them into the room, and they call that the wait time. But patients themselves consider their wait time the entire time they’re in the lobby.”
