ER waits dangerously long in U.S.: study

[Celebration]

http://www.reuters.com/article/health-SP-A/idUSN1549047220080115

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Patients seeking urgent care in U.S. emergency rooms are waiting longer than in the 1990s, especially people with heart attacks, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.

They found a quarter of heart attack victims waited 50 minutes or more before seeing a doctor in 2004. Waits for all types of emergency department visits became 36 percent longer between 1997 and 2004, the team at Harvard Medical School reported.

Especially unsettling, people who had seen a triage nurse and been designated as needing immediate attention waited 40 percent longer -- from an average of 10 minutes in 1997 to an average 14 minutes in 2004, the researchers report in the journal Health Affairs.

Heart attack patients waited eight minutes in 1997 but 20 minutes in 2004, Dr. Andrew Wilper and colleagues found.

"If a loved one has a heart attack, it doesn't matter whether he is well insured. He still has a one-in-four chance of waiting over 50 minutes, because of ED (emergency department) overcrowding, and this wait will only increase," Dr. Robert Lowe, an emergency medicine expert at Oregon Health and Science University who did not work on the study, said in a statement.

[grasswire]

1. that's not my experience

Say the words "chest pain, tachycardia, shortness of breath" and the patient is whisked in within a minute or two.

[grasswire]

2. a thought -- maybe it's best to call paramedics...

...for heart attack symptoms. Getting to and going through the front door of an ER takes up time. If you call paramedics, you get assessment and treatment from the first moment they arrive. Their EKG machine tells them if the rhythm is abnormal. They have the ability to resuscitate. And if they send you in an ambulance, you don't go through the triage.

[Celebration]

3. problem with that

You have to know your location. We can have 911 calls wait 45 minutes here.

[silverweb]

4. Another argument FOR universal health care.

If everyone could visit a regular doctor for routine checkups and illnesses, people wouldn't be forced to use the ER for less than real emergencies.

What we're seeing here is the breakdown of the most backwards and inefficient health care system imaginable -- and everyone suffers, especially those who need help the most, either acutely or chronically.