Patients Waiting Longer to See the Doctor
Jun 24, 5:28 AM (ET)
By MIKE STOBBE
ATLANTA (AP) - Patients on average spent more time waiting for a doctor in hospital emergency rooms in 2004 than they did seven years earlier, according to federal statistics announced Friday.
Overall, more than 1.1 billion visits were made to emergency departments, doctor's offices and hospital outpatient centers in 2004, a record, the National Center for Health Statistics said.
The increasing visits partly reflect an 11 percent increase in the U.S. population in the last 10 years, but people also were seeking care more often, the center said.
The results are based on surveys of more than 400 hospitals and about 1,400 doctor's offices. Researchers found that visits rose 31 percent in the past 10 years, to 1.1 billion visits in 2004. Federal health care facilities were not included.
Nearly half the visits were to primary-care doctors in office-based practices. About 10 percent were to hospital emergency rooms and the rest were to specialists in office-based practices, outpatient departments in general and short-stay hospitals.
In the last 10 years, there was no change in the average time a patient spent face-to-face with a physician in office settings. But, because of rising patient volume, the amount of time a patient waited before seeing a physician in an ER increased from 38 minutes in 1997 to 47 minutes in 2004.
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