WAIT TIME IN EMERGENCY ROOM ON RISE
The average time that patients wait in a hospital emergency room has grown from 38 minutes to almost an hour over the course of the last decade. The increase in visits made to the U.S. emergency rooms is 32% over the last ten years. Unfortunately, the number of hospital emergency departments have dropped. Obviously, with the number of emergency room visits increasing and the number of emergency departments decreasing, this spells a recipe for disaster for patients.
This is troubling news for consumers. This clearly identifies that people in need of medical care are being delayed, including people suffering from heart disease, heart attacks or other life threatening situations that require immediate care. Fifty six minutes can, literally, be a life and death situation for someone in the emergency room. These types of delays will inevitably expose hospitals and their emergency rooms to litigation in the future.
Coincidentally, the findings also demonstrated that summer and winter were the busiest seasons in the emergency rooms and the early evening, around 7:00 p.m., tended to be the busiest time of the day.
The Law Offices of Jeffrey J. Kroll has a proven track record of obtaining successful outcomes in medical malpractice cases. For example, I received a $7,000,000.00 verdict in a case involving failure to detect colon cancer in a 40-year-old anemic man.
