Emergency room waits

A ‘perfect storm’ in health care has left patients in critical condition waiting to see doctors

Saturday, Jan. 19, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Patients are waiting longer in emergency rooms, according to a study by Harvard researchers, and that could have fatal consequences.

The researchers looked at emergency room wait times from 1997 to 2004 and found a marked increase. Emergency room patients waited on average at least 30 minutes in 2004 to see a doctor, a 36 percent increase over the average wait time in 1997.

Patients with serious conditions were no exception. In 1997 patients with conditions that warranted being treated within 15 minutes were seen on average within 10 minutes. In 2004 that wait grew to 14 minutes. The average wait time for a heart attack patient grew from eight minutes to 20 minutes.

That extra waiting time could lead to complications, longer recoveries and deaths.

“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,” the study’s lead author, Dr. Andrew Wilper, told The Washington Post. “The numbers show that the emergency care system in the U.S. is on the ropes.”

The long waits that patients endure in emergency rooms are being created by what Wilper termed a “perfect storm” in medicine.

“It’s hard to ignore the fact that several hundred ERs have closed their doors, and we’ve seen an increase in the number of patients using ERs,” Wilper told HealthDay, an online health news service. “Plus, there are a number of internal factors contributing, like bottlenecks because of a lack of inpatient bed space and a lack of specialists available to treat patients.”

The problems with emergency rooms summarize the overarching problems in the nation’s health care system. Despite the disagreement in Washington over how to address health care, we would think that improving emergency care would garner bipartisan support.