Waiting time for the ER grows to one hour
Patient Safety Monitor Alert
August 13, 2008
The average emergency room (ER) waiting time for patients has grown to nearly one hour, reports The Boston Globe. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report showing that over the past decade this wait time has increased from 38 minutes. The reason the wait time has gone up is due to two main factors: A 32% increase in the number of visits to the ER (90 million visits were made in 1996 and 119 million were made in 2006) and a reduction in the overall number of ERs across the country.
Additionally, a shortage in specialists and primary care physicians (PCP) have added patients to the increased number of visits; when patients can't make an appointment with their normal specialist or PCP they often head to the ER.
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