‘How’s it been?’ I ask one of the doctors who’s about to leave.

He shakes his head ruefully. ‘Have you seen the waiting room?’

I nod. Have I ever.

‘Yeah, it’s been fucking shit,’ he tells me, suppressing a yawn. ‘Sorry to leave you with it.’

‘It’s all right,’ I say. ‘It’s not your fault.’

‘A patient told me tonight if I missed his vein when I cannulated him that he’d kill me,’ the doctor tells me. ‘I said, “Is that a threat on my life, sir?” And then I missed his vein anyway.’

We both laugh, even though it isn’t that funny. If someone makes a threat like that on a flight, they’ll be arrested. But threatening a doctor inside an emergency department while they’re trying to help you is apparently nothing to worry about. People probably think it’s a good thing; it might make us work faster.

Our hospital is, apparently, the best-performing emergency department in the state. It’s debatable what this actually means. To the hospital board, it means that we’re the best at meeting the government’s arbitrarily created key performance indicators. Some genius, in all their wisdom, has created a timeframe called ‘the four-hour rule’. If a patient isn’t seen, reviewed, assessed, investigated, diagnosed and then treated or admitted to the ward in less than four hours, we’re informed by the ‘emergency department navigator’ that ‘we have breached’. The emergency department navigator is a nurse whose sole role is to harass the doctors on the floor when they fail to meet the timeframe. To ensure maximum humiliation, they call your name over a loudspeaker so the entire department knows you’re going too slowly.

‘Katarina, to the navigator’s desk, please.’

They don’t give two shits that you’re seeing three or four patients at any given time, that most or all of them have something complex wrong with them, that you’ve called about a million specialists to come and review them but they’re all stuck on the ward or in theatre. All that matters to the navigator is that every patient is either cured or at least shipped into an overcrowded ward within two hundred and forty minutes.

‘Kitty, can you pick up the ear pain in the waiting room?’ Matt asks me as I stare at the computer, trying to figure out which will be the least taxing patient. ‘He’s been here a while …’

He clicks my name off before I can respond, as if I actually have a choice, and I trundle into the waiting room to meet Jason, a thirty-seven-year-old male with a sudden onset left ear problem.

‘Jason?’

Two men stand up, one looking pained. Jason, I discover, has brought along a friend, who happens to be a private ENT surgeon.