Well as an example, I worked in 'Main Outpatients' at a hospital without A&E. Each Consultant needed a member of nursing staff (NOT necessarily a qualified RN, but either a RN or a Care Assistant). That member of staff would be a chaperone, assistant, do whatever was needed.
A vascular consultant's list would need staff to see patients through to the clinic room, remove current dressings and soak/clean the wound for inspection, prepare any equipment needed for the consultation, then re-dress the wound. Meanwhile, another member of staff would be preparing the next patient because if this didn't happen, patients would have to wait the full 20 minutes or so it takes to remove, clean and redress wounds as well as the consultation time itself.
Outpatients is one of those areas that you can have far too many staff in one moment of a day, then vastly too few another.
Interesting, so is specialist theatres. To staff them adequately you need 6-7 staff for 3 nursing beds. That is only just enough if you are doing a rapid list, where patients conditions are 'cut and shut'. By the time one nurse is in the anaesthetic room with a patient, another is protecting the airway of someone just out of theatre, and yet another is on a ward handing the previous patient over to the nursing staff, it really is touch and go whether you can safely operate.
On other days, where there may be just 3 emergency tumour removals/resections, the operations can take 5-8 hours. That means that recovery staff are essentially 'sitting around' for hours. They can't go elsewhere, because the operation is unpredictable, so they have to be available. So they do various 'housekeeping tasks' such as stock ordering, cleaning equipment (cleaners clean the rooms, but not medical equipment), safety checks, Continuing Professional Development reading, etc. To a stranger they would look like they were merely pottering around.