Waiting in the E.R could hurt your health
Kristin Hawley
Waiting in an Emergency Room to get admitted to a hospital isn't anything new. But if you end up waiting too long, it could affect your health.
ER crowding is a big problem that only seems to be getting worse. But a new study is showing that if the wait is too long, it can cause more problems than you think.
According to some experts, ER crowding has reached a critical point. Part of the reason for this crowding might be called the "trickle down" effect. In other words, because patients getting admitted overnight to the hospital don't have a bed upstairs in the hospital they end up "boarding" in the ER. That increased boarding time means less ER beds are available to see ER patients and the backup continues. This means longer wait times to be seen.
But these researchers also wanted to find out if those waiting to get an upstairs inpatient bed might also be having problems because of the longer boarding time in the ER. So they decided to look at elderly patients and see what happened to them after they left the hospital, then compared that to how long they waited in the ER to get placed in their upstairs room.
The results were pretty amazing. For patients whose wait was under 6 hours, only about four percent needed to go to a nursing home after leaving the hospital. For those whose wait was longer than six hours, 18 percent, or three times as many, needed to go to a nursing home once they were discharged from the hospital.
The thought is that excessive time waiting to get upstairs means more disruptions during the early part of a hospital admission. That can lead to a decline in function required a nursing home stay.
