WICHITA, Kansas, June 4, 2008 – With emergency rooms across the country become more crowded, doctors are sounding the alarm that something must be done soon or all hospitals, including Wichita’s, will be in crisis.

It’s a dangerous new trend at more U.S. hospitals: emergency room patients being forced to wait in the hall for an open room and enough doctors and nurses to handle the load.

"We know that an ambulance is diverted once every minute across this country,” said Dr. Nicholas Jouriles with the American College of Emergency Physicians.” “So, if we're at or above capacity now every single day, what would happen in the case of a disaster, whether it's man made, natural or terrorists. We are simply not prepared for that.”

But Wichita hospitals disagree saying they regularly train for just that scenario.

"When the Andover tornado hit, everybody flooded in here to help,” said Dr. Francie Ekengren, Wesley Medical Center’s Chief Medical Officer. “I don't think anything has changed. I think it would be all hands on deck.”

In fact, Wichita now has more emergency care than ever with Wesley opening its west Wichita ER and the Galichia Heart Hospital adding an emergency department.

Altogether, there are 123 ER beds in Wichita serving an increasing number of patients. Last year, they served a total of 198,000.

"It's feast or famine,” Ekengren said. ”It may be very slow, and then sometimes you feel like you're drinking water from a fire hydrant because the patients keep coming."

That’s when she says an ambulance may be diverted to another ER of a patient already treated must wait for a nurse to be transferred.

"We'll have maybe a three-hour wait once in a while because the patients haven't got somebody at the bedside ready to receive them,” Ekengren said.

That occasional overload now could become more common in the future as more uninsured patients use the ER for all their medical care. Until that problem is addressed, even Wichita hospitals are not immune to the threat of overcrowding.

Just last month, hundreds of doctors testified on Capitol Hill asking from more funding for hospitals so they can staff their beds.