Emergency rooms across the globe are facing unprecedented pressures, with patients enduring longer waits than ever before and staff stretched to their limits. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, the convergence of seasonal illnesses, systemic challenges, and shifting healthcare policies has created a perfect storm, leaving hospitals scrambling for solutions—and sometimes, simply apologizing for the delays.
According to a recent study from the University of Michigan Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, more than a quarter of all patients admitted to emergency departments in the past three years spent at least four hours waiting for care. This trend, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has become a defining feature of emergency care in the 2020s. For many, these waits have stretched not just into hours but, in some cases, into days.
Baptist Health Medical Center-North Little Rock in Arkansas, a faith-based hospital, was no exception to this national ordeal. Its president, Cody Walker, described a situation where patients sometimes waited hours or even days in the emergency room before receiving care. "We realized that to achieve excellence in operations, we were going to need to step up our game and start leveraging some of the generative AI tools that were out there to help us understand better what was coming ahead," Walker said, as reported by U.S. News & World Report.
To tackle the crisis, Baptist Health partnered with LeanTaaS, a healthcare technology company, to launch Operation Raptor—an ambitious initiative powered by artificial intelligence. This AI platform pulls data from electronic health records, staffing schedules, and even weather trends to predict when the emergency department will reach capacity. Staff receive real-time alerts, empowering them to act proactively rather than reactively. One of the key findings from Operation Raptor was that many emergency room patients were being discharged in the afternoon and late evening, clogging the system at peak times. By shifting more discharges to earlier in the day, the hospital managed to cut the speed of patient discharges in half.
The results have been striking. Before Operation Raptor, the average time between a patient’s discharge and the arrival of the next patient in that room was 313 minutes. Now, that figure has dropped to 172 minutes, and in some Baptist hospitals, it’s as low as 150 minutes. The number of patients waiting more than four hours has been slashed by half, and overall hospital admissions have risen by 6%—all without building a single new room. "The speed at which we're discharging patients has been cut in half since starting this work," Walker noted. "It has given the benefit to the ER patients who are waiting on those rooms to be freed up."
But not all hospitals have access to such technological lifelines. In the United Kingdom, the situation has reached a crisis point, particularly in Northern Ireland. On the morning of December 3, 2025, patients at Craigavon Area Hospital’s emergency department faced average waits of nearly 19 hours, according to BBC News NI. The Royal Victoria and Ulster hospitals reported average waits of about nine hours. The day before, over 40 ambulances were backed up outside hospitals, with the longest wait lasting more than 13 hours.
Dr. Gareth Hampton, divisional medical director at the Southern Trust, offered a heartfelt apology: "We really are sorry for the patients who wait that long but the staff have a really difficult job." He explained that staff were forced to balance the needs of critically ill patients and those who had waited the longest, a juggling act made even harder by the lack of available beds. "Over the last three years we've seen serious pressure on our emergency departments," Hampton said. "Whenever we get to the winter time increased respiratory issues such as Covid and flu just put that extra bit of pressure. We really struggle to cope with peaks of demand."
The flu season has hit especially hard this year. Dr. Peter Naughton, a health protection consultant with the Public Health Agency, told BBC News NI that there had been about 900 new cases of flu in the past week—twice as many as the previous week—and roughly 250 of those patients ended up in the hospital. At Craigavon Area Hospital alone, 30 adults were hospitalized with flu on December 3. The Public Health Agency warned that the highest rates were among young children, especially those aged 0-4.
The strain on staff is palpable. Dr. Michael Perry, Vice President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, described the mood as "demoralised and angry." He said, "I'm a clinician and I want to be treating the sickest patients that come into our department. We're being asked to make the least worst decisions at the minute." The constant pressure has led to retention problems, as exhausted nurses and doctors see no end in sight. "If you can get out of this environment, what's to keep you here? Because there is no light," Perry lamented.
Dr. Clodagh Corrigan, deputy chair of the British Medical Association NI council, echoed these concerns. "The thing that I hate most about my job is when my hands are tied," she told the BBC. "I'm looking at a waiting room full of patients, and then I'm looking at a department full of patients and I literally have nowhere to go and nothing that I can do to ease the pressures. When you're in that absolute gridlock there's absolutely nothing you can do, and it is completely soul-destroying."
The ambulance service is also under siege. Neil Sinclair, director of operations for the Northern Ireland Ambulance Service, reported that 80 patients were waiting for ambulances and 66 incidents were being attended to on December 3, with 32 of those at emergency departments. "At present we are experiencing more flu and Covid than anticipated, and therefore demand is outstripping capacity," he said. Delays have been compounded by trade union action short of a strike, and Sinclair warned that if things did not improve, response times would only get longer.
Efforts to reduce ambulance wait times have had limited success. In October, a target was set to halve maximum ambulance waits outside emergency departments from four hours to two by December 1. Yet, as winter pressures mount, these goals remain elusive. The Northern Ireland Ambulance Service acknowledged the "lengthy waits that some have experienced," adding that despite "significant work" to reduce handover delays, the system continues to operate under "very high pressure."
Back in the U.S., Cody Walker urged other hospital leaders to act quickly, especially in light of recent legislation that includes Medicaid cuts. Analysts warn that over 11 million Americans could lose full coverage, potentially leading to a surge of uncompensated care. "We're going to experience that wave of uncompensated care at our front door, and we're going to be wishing that we had started it a long time ago," Walker cautioned.
As emergency departments on both sides of the Atlantic grapple with mounting challenges, the search for solutions—technological, systemic, and human—has never been more urgent. The stakes are high, and for patients and staff alike, every minute counts.