United States, medium sized hospital in the Chicago suburbs.

Illinois, one of the Chicago suburbs.

17 years ago on a Saturday night, just before bedtime, my 4yo son was being a dufus and managed to break his collarbone. Before we knew it was broken (but knew something was obviously wrong) I took him to the emergency room. We were stuck waiting about 6 hours to be seen. The nurse that triaged us was extremely apologetic and literally stated “I’m so sorry you’ve had to wait so long, we’re stuck having to see the drunken scraped knees first just because they came in an ambulance.”

I’m assuming that if my son were bleeding out he would be seen faster, but I’ve assumed that in non-life threatening situations that ambulances receive priority.