Emergency Room Wait Times Vary Widely

iStock/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — How long did you have to wait the last time you visited an emergency room?

According to two new studies reported in JAMA Internal Medicine, wait and treatment times vary widely, and the hospital setting is a factor.

An analysis of medical records for adults seen at almost 3,700 different emergency rooms across the country in 2012 and 2013 shows admitted patients spent an average of four hours in the ER, with about one-third of that time occurring after admission while waiting for an in-patient bed to become available.

Patients who did not end up getting admitted waited an average of a half-hour to see a health care professional, and overall spent a little more than two hours in the ER.

The analysis also showed that ER patients at urban hospitals waited longer to see someone and spent more time overall in the ER than patients at smaller and/or rural facilities.

And among admitted patients, those seen at either a public hospital or a major teaching hospital tended to get stuck in the ER longer than those admitted to other types of care centers.

In a separate analysis of data from nearly 25,000 ER visits, just over half of the ERs were able to get a vast majority of admitted patients in and out within an 8-hour period, but less than a quarter of ERs were able to get 90 percent of their non-admitted patients discharged within a four-hour period. That data was collected by the 2010 National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey.

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