Emergency Room Patients Waiting Longer

James Sabatini

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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. The longer waits affect insureds and uninsureds equally. 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. The longer waits are being attributed to the fact that emergency room patients are not money makers for the hospitals, thus emergency rooms are being shut down or scaled down.

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