Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Older Americans are Spend more time in emergency rooms that before, according to the researchers.
Boston doctors announced this week that the average length of stay and boarding hours for people over 65 had increased considerably between 2017 and 2024.
Trends, note doctors, indicate systemic challenges Country hospitals. They also signal an increasingly frustrating and potentially dangerous experience for patients.
“The worsening of the duration of the emergency services for the stay and the boarding contribute to the size of the emergency department, reflect the dysfunction of systemic health care and, above all, harm individual patients”, they explain.
To achieve these conclusions, doctors used data from 1,633 hospitals and 295 million patients. They analyzed the emergency services meetings that were recorded between January 2017 and December 2024.
They focused on the proportion of older adults with a stay of more than eight hours and the proportion of patients admitted waiting for more than three hours when they asked for a bed and their admission.
In 2017, 12% of more than 4 million emergency meetings involved a stay of more than eight hours. Last year, this percentage reached 20% of more than 12 million games.
During the same period, meetings involving boarding times of more than three hours increased from 22% of 1.8 million meetings in 2017 to 36% of the 4.3 million meetings in 2024. The highest increase was reported in university hospitals, with boarding times of more than three hours of 31% in 2017 at 45% in 2024.
Before Covid, there were small points observed in the two measures that were followed by clearer increases during the peak of the pandemic. From 2022 to 2024, while more and more Americans were vaccinated against Covid, the two trends have slightly decreased.
The authors suggested that these increases could be motivated by several factors, such as the increase in the complexity of patients, growing demand and current staff and resource shortages.
Health care labor shortages should increase Through the United States in the coming years, demand far exceeding the supply in certain specialties, according to a report by the National Foundation for the Management of Non-Lucrative Health Care. There could be a shortage of Up to 100,000 critical health workers By 2028, the consulting company Mercer warned.
In recent years, many nurses and doctors have said that they feel exhausted – although Exhaustion rates would not be as high as they were During the early years of Covid, a study by Stanford Medicine revealed.
But, overcrowding emergency rooms is nothing new. An investigation in 2022 by the US college of emergency doctors noted that 97% of emergency doctors said they had experienced boarding times of patients over 24 hours, and more than a quarter indicated Patients were forced to stay in the emergency room for more than two weeks before obtaining a hospital bed.
The solutions to this problem are not yet all. To try to repair it, doctors have suggested Treat only patients with emergencies, increase hospital capacity, change intake models and ensure that patients are not found in emergencies in the first place thanks to increased prevention of diseases. A program started in 2020 Install hospital beds at patients’ homes.
Without established solutions, the results can be negative for the elderly, which represent more than 20% of visits to emergency services, according to the centers for disease control and prevention 2022 data.
“You really don’t want an 85 -year -old or older patient to dwell on and somehow stranded in the emergency room for hours and days,” said Dr. Ula Hwang, medical director of geriatric emergency medicine in Nyu Langone Health in New York, said to the American Heart Association in May. “It has been shown that if you are an elderly person and go up in the emergency department during the night, you are more likely to develop delirium, even potentially hospital mortality.”
The researchers noted that a new measurement In force this year, the limits of less than eight hours and admissions at three hours.
“The fight against these trends is essential to protect both the health of the elderly and the health systems that take care of them,” concluded the authors.
The results were announced in a research letter published Monday in the journal Jama internal medicine.
