The word patient comes from the Latin patiens — an adjective meaning enduring, suffering. In medicine, that endurance has long meant waiting: waiting to be seen, to be diagnosed, to be treated. Over the past two decades of practicing emergency medicine, my shifts have begun the same way — walking past a room full of people waiting for care.
That room is not called a lobby or a reception area. It is called a waiting room, because the expectation of waiting is built into the architecture and culture of medicine. Triage — the systematic process of prioritizing patients by the severity of their condition — determines the length of the delay. The sickest are seen first; everyone else bears both their illness and the constraints of the system they have turned to for help.
