Ambulances waiting at hospitals for six hours
In Los Angeles County, emergency rooms are so crowded that some ambulances have been forced to wait as long as six hours to offload patients, said Cathy Chidester, director of the Los Angeles County Emergency Medical Services Agency. Some patients arriving by ambulance are asked to sit in the emergency department lobby so the ambulance can depart.
California is also desperately seeking more medical staff from overseas, perhaps from as far away as Australia, while opening field hospitals to care for non-ICU patients in places such as Costa Mesa, Porterville, Sacramento and Imperial; other facilities are on standby status in Riverside, Richmond, Fresno, San Diego and San Francisco.