National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey: 2006 Emergency Department Summary

Here’s a link to the CDC’s summary

Average ER waiting time nears 1 hour, CDC says

From the Washington Post:

The average time that hospital emergency rooms patients wait to see a doctor has grown from about 38 minutes to almost an hour over the past decade, according to new federal statistics released Wednesday.

The increase is due to supply and demand, said Dr. Stephen Pitts, the lead author of the report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“There are more people arriving at the ERs. And there are fewer ERs,” said Pitts, an associate professor of emergency medicine at Atlanta’s Emory University.

As Urgent Care Grows, Watchdogs Circle

From the Wall Street Journal Health Blog:

The number of emergency rooms has been falling in recent years, as the number of people heading into the ER has been climbing.

Urgent care centers — doc-in-a-box outfits that handle urgent health problems that aren’t life-threatening — have been growing to take up some of the slack.

But, this morning’s WSJ notes, urgent care has remained largely unregulated. Urgent care doctors and nurses do have to be licensed the same as health care providers anywhere else, but there are no national standards for what urgent care centers should offer, or what quality measures they should meet.

That looks likely to change. The Urgent Care Association of America recently made a deal with the Joint Commission, the group that accredits the nation’s hospitals, to accredit urgent care centers and publish national quality standards by 2010.

Emergency Room Visits Hit Record High

From the Wall Street Journal Health Blog:

There were 119 million emergency room visits in 2006, the  feds are reporting this morning. That’s the most ever, and an increase of 36% in the course of a decade.

During the same period, the number of emergency rooms fell, from 4,019 to 3,833.

The authors, from the government’s division of health care statistics, duly note that the increase is driving longer wait times for minor and serious problems as well as boarding of patients in hallways.