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Emergency room waits get longer, report says

By Washington Post
Published January 15, 2008

WASHINGTON - 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 emergency services, according to a study by researchers at Harvard Medical School.

Half of all emergency room patients waited 30 minutes or more before being examined by a doctor in 2004, a 36 percent 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 more to be examined in 2004, up from 8 minutes in 1997, the study found. By 2004, other patients whose conditions warranted treatment within 15 minutes were waiting 14 minutes or more 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. "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 and 2004, by the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, a nationally representative database.

Three reports issued in 2006 by the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academies, concluded that the nation's emergency medical system is "overburdened, underfunded and highly fragmented."

[Last modified January 14, 2008, 23:30:37]