A full emergency waiting room

One line is drawn across the mouth of the corridor people come in through, and another across the way through to the care area: whoever crosses them is added or subtracted. And two areas are painted over the image, one over the rows of chairs and one over the corridor where people wait on their feet. Those four things give the figures that matter: how many people are in the hall right now, how many have a seat and how many do not. None of this is asked for in words. Asking is for searching and for describing a situation; counting needs to know exactly where the line runs and in which direction, and only a stroke drawn on the image settles that. So it is drawn once and stays there, and that is why Tuesday's number and Saturday's are measured the same way: they are repeatable and they can be audited.

Today, to know how many people are in the hall, somebody has to walk down and look; and how long the wait really was is known afterwards, pulling the figure from the admissions system. With the lines and the areas in place, the head of the emergency department sees the curve while it is happening, and the nursing supervisor sees how many people are left without a seat, which is the sign that the room has run out of give. What weighs most is not the number right now: it is that by the end of the month you can see at what time the peak repeats every week, and that is what you take into the meeting where an extra shift gets decided. It is a staffing and space decision, never a clinical one: IRIS does not triage, does not prioritise anybody and does not say who should be seen first. The capacity at which something has to be done is written by the hospital, not by us. And the people waiting there are frightened human beings, not a figure: the number exists so that there are more hands when they are needed, not to sort anyone. The values on the plate are an example, not the measurement of any department.