I have never ridden in an ambulance, but my husband has several times. They do tend to see ambulance patients more quickly than walk-ins, but as he has developed more and more health problems it seems to take less and less time before we are seen.
The longest we ever spent in an emergency room was 11 hours. It was shortly after Katrina and Rita so the hospitals were incredibly full of patients from Louisiana and Mississippi (we are in Texas) and we waited that long for him to get a bed upstairs.
Most recently we went to the emergency room and got seen within 30 minutes. This was in large part because I have learned how to talk to triage nurses. To a lesser degree it was because my husband looked sick, which, when used by an ER worker, means “this guy is not going to be sent home. He needs to go into the hospital so let’s go ahead and start an IV now in case he codes.”
Oddly enough, when his gall bladder burst we went to the ER twice and they kept sending him home, but with an appointment to be assessed for surgery. Fortunately he went into a coma while we were waiting in that doctor’s office, which was in the hospital that has the trauma center. The nurses got to wheel him from the doctor’s office straight to ICU – they were thrilled because they never get to do that. He remained in a coma for three weeks but he pulled through.
There are code words that let the ER staff know who needs to be seen ASAP, and we apparently are using them now.