Emergency room waits grow, study says
Patients are waiting longer for care in the nation’s emergency rooms, a potentially deadly result of the shrinking number of emergency departments and rising demand for services, according to a new study by researchers at Harvard Medical School.
Half of all emergency room patients waited 30 minutes or longer before being examined by a doctor in 2004, a 36% increase from a median wait time of 22 minutes in 1997, according to the study, published Monday in the journal Health Affairs.
Even those suffering from heart attacks are not guaranteed speedy treatment, with half waiting 20 minutes or longer to be examined in 2004, up from eight minutes in 1997, the study found.
Ditto for those with other serious health problems: By 2004, patients whose conditions warranted treatment within 15 minutes were waiting 14 minutes or longer to see a doctor, up from 10 minutes in 1997, the study found.
“We all may need to use the emergency department at one time or another, and it’s important for us to be able to rely on it if we need care,” said lead author Andrew Wilper, a fellow in internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and a physician at Cambridge Health Alliance, a Harvard teaching affiliate. “The numbers show that the emergency care system in the U.S. is on the ropes.”
The researchers analyzed data on patient visits and wait times collected from 1997 to 2000, and from 2003 to 2004, by the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, a nationally representative database.
Among other findings, they learned that wait times tended to be longer for African Americans and Latinos, perhaps because they were more likely to be treated in urban emergency departments, which are more likely to be overcrowded.
In recent years, several reports have detailed how emergency room care in the United States has been stretched to the breaking point.
Between 40% and 50% of emergency departments experienced overcrowding in 2004, according to a 2006 study by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Three reports issued in 2006 by the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academies, concluded that the U.S. emergency medical system was “overburdened, underfunded and highly fragmented.”
Factors include an aging population, shortages of nurses and primary-care doctors, more uninsured patients, more people coming to the emergency room for non-urgent health problems, and the closures of some hospitals as more procedures are done on an outpatient basis, experts say.
“Ever-lengthening waits are a frightening trend because any delays in care can make the difference between life and death for some patients,” Linda Lawrence, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians, said in a statement.
