January 4, 2012Dear Sir,I had the misfortune to visit the Emergency Department on Monday, January 2, and found the staff overwhelmed with a huge number of people who could not be classified as emergencies at all. Colds, minor injuries like an injured thumb etc. The nurse came out and explained that the beds in the ER were all taken and the wait for the average person would be about four hours and suggested that we go to the St David’s clinic if we were not in acute distress.As a registered nurse who has never worked in Bermuda, I quickly assessed that the reason for the overwhelmed ER was that the long weekend without family doctors made it necessary for people to come to the hospital. Massachusetts General Hospital has a walk-in clinic for non-emergency patients and I think Bermuda badly needs one as our doctors don’t make house calls. With non-urgent cases filling up beds with headaches and belly aches and needing expensive tests once they come to the ER, we could take a small portion of the ER and make it into a walk-in clinic and also perhaps have a telephone triage nurse who could assess and direct patients to the walk-in clinic or the St David’s facility so they don’t need to waste the time of highly trained ER doctors and thus automatically reduce the wait time in the ER.Also those awful cheap chairs are most uncomfortable if you are not feeling well or having to inhale the revolting food being consumed by people I suspect are homeless and just getting out of the cold. Perhaps there is room for five or six recliners for the truly unwell while they wait to get into the ER. The cost of treating people in the Emergency department is considerably higher than in a clinic and I do hope the hospital will give consideration to this idea.PATIENTCity of Hamilton