You can guarantee that you'll be there for at least 10 hours and even more if you need to be admitted. The seats in ER are like sitting on concrete, so you'll be guaranteed to be extremely uncomfortable within 30 mins of your wait. Add to that, people staring at you whilst you're in pain, just adds to the issues. There's no privacy at all.

Part of the issue is people attending ER for trivial things that they should be visiting their GP for instead.

That's only part of the problems though.

It also affects other services negatively. Having to undertake an endoscopy is a terrifying experience due to lack of beds. They use a sedative which doesn't work and results in you waking up in the middle of the procedure and being pinned to the bed whilst gagging and choking on the tube.

I felt violated the last two times I've had to have this done and it affected me mentally in a big way, being too scarred emotionally to talk for a couple of days at least. Having your throat damaged by the forceful nature of being pinned down whilst choking doesn't help either.

These adverse knock-on effects result in, frankly, inhumane treatments that should be handled a lot better.

This shit has been going on for years and needs to be resolved. Enough is enough.