(Reuters Health) – The number of emergency rooms has dropped by more than a quarter over the past two decades, while patient visits have kept rising, researchers said Tuesday.
The result is overcrowded ERs that can’t provide optimal care for their patients, according to the new findings, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“This is a continuously deteriorating situation,” said Dr. Renee Hsia, an emergency physician at the University of California, San Francisco, who worked on the study. “It’s a threat to everyone’s care.”
In the first study of its kind, Hsia and her colleagues used data from the American Hospital Association to track which hospitals closed or opened ERs across the nation.
From 1990 through 2009, they saw a drop from 2,446 to 1,779 urban ERs, corresponding to 27 percent.
“That’s a huge number,” Hsia told Reuters Health. “When you look at ER visits over the same time period, there was a 35-percent increase.”
ERs are the only part of the U.S. healthcare system required to treat all patients, regardless of whether they can pay. But hospitals aren’t required to have an ER, Hsia said, so that is a natural place to look for savings when the economy is tight.
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