Know All About Emergency Room waiting times

In the weak economy more workers are losing their jobs and health insurance, and an aging population confronts unfamiliar medical challenges. Hospital officials around the county have scrambled to keep up with the influx, which they say has been growing by 5 percent to 10 percent each year.

ER delays cause more than just exasperation for patients and lost income for hospitals.When people wait long periods to be admitted from the emergency department into the main hospital, death rates and chances of medical error can be higher. This practice of "boarding" patients in the emergency department is the biggest problem facing California hospitals. The faster a boarded patient is moved into the main hospital, the faster a person in the emergency waiting room can receive treatment. Typically, up to 60 percent of inpatients start out in the ER.

Many hospitals in San Diego are building larger emergency departments, increasing staffing and adding daytime fast-track clinics to handle minor ailments, such as a sore throat. Patients visiting California emergency departments waited an average of four hours, 34 minutes last year during their trip to the E.R. One factor in the long waits is hospital bed space. That's two minutes longer than they waited in 2008 and 27 minutes longer than the national average.

New York and Arizona are a fewsome of the states that have longer wait times. Utah ranked at the bottom---there, patients wait an average of more than eight hours. The figures are part of a recent analysis of time spent in emergency departments by health care consulting firm Press Ganey. Wait times were based on calculations of more than 1.5 million patients treated at 1,893 hospitals in 2009. Overall, wait times increased an average of four minutes last year.

California ranks 40th in the U.S. for wait times, trailing Iowa, the state with the shortest waits, by 99 minutes. In Utah – where the report says low rates of insured patients, staffed inpatient beds and registered nurses could have contributed to the 89-minute jump in wait

time last year – people spent an average of eight hours, 17 minutes in the emergency department. Studies point to a variety of challenges in emergency care, including a shortage of medical facilities.



California has 7.1 emergency departments per 1 million people, compared to an average of 19.9 among other states, according to the American College of Emergency Physicians' 2009 National Report Card on the State of Emergency Medicine. Many emergency department visits could be avoided with improved access to primary care providers and urgent care centers. But reducing emergency department overcrowding will take more than access to primary care. It will also require that hospitals run more efficiently, and move patients through the system and ready them for admission more quickly, he said.

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Ishan Goraydiya is passionate writer and loves writing about san diego medical jobs.