Why YSK: If you’re injured or ill but it’s not life or limb threatening and you decide to call an ambulance thinking it’ll be faster and you’ll be seen first… WRONG. Ambulance crews very frequently will advise the hospital staff that you “can wait”. Then we’ll plop you into a wheel chair and push you into the waiting room with everyone else.
I’ve had to take ambulances many times in my country, and it’s the same here. Triage is triage, I would be shocked if it worked differently… anywhere. If ambulances got you seen faster, it would be at the expense of someone who needed treatment more, and that’s bad from both a healthcare perspective (you will save fewer patients) and a financial perspective (dead patients don’t pay).
That’s fair and logical arguments. But I guess you are already kind of treated in the ambulance, and if it’s not long to finish treating you fully after that, would they do it so they can dismiss you and focus on the rest of the patients?
Ambulances don’t really “treat” you, except in the simplest of cases. A paramedic/EMT is not a doctor. Their training is largely in stabilizing you, that is, making sure you don’t die before you get to the hospital, where you enter the triage system. They haven’t treated you, they’ve only done their best to keep the problem from getting worse. (I’m not saying this isn’t a valuable skill, just that it’s not the same as “kind of treating” you)