If you'd ever need to visit the emergency room during a night shift you'd know why (not that it's much different during day time). The number might seem big, but that includes everybody from the janitor to the cleaning stuff, to the administrators and secretaries of each clinic, to cooks, security and ambulance crews (and for many of them it's a "times 3" calculation, since they need staff 24/7). It's still only about half the staff of, for instance, some German hospitals, which have numbers upwards of 4000 and even there you can see long waiting lists for surgical procedures, doctors complaining about long hours and little pay (and some are even migrating to other countries!)...