Accident & Injury Law in Texas

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Nationwide, more patients are seeking care in fewer ERs.

The average time that hospital emergency rooms patients wait to see a doctor has grown from about 38 minutes to almost an hour in the past decade, according to federal statistics released last month.

According to the report authored by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the increase is due to supply and demand - more people arriving at ERs and fewer ERs.

In 2006, about 119 million visits were made to emergency rooms, up 32 percent from 1996 while the number of hospital emergency departments dropped to under 4,600 from nearly 4,900.

Other factors raising the wait time is the limited number of hospital beds (forcing people to wait in the ER room), shortage of surgical specialists, and patients turning to the ER when they cannot get an appointment with their doctor.

Emergency room patients at St. David’s five hospitals in Travis and Williamson counties waited an average of an hour to see a doctor so far this year, up five minutes from a year ago, according to David Thomsen, the system’s vice president of quality.

According to the CDC study, most patients spend more than two hours, but fewer than four hours in emergency rooms.

About 40 percent of emergency room patients had private insurance, about 25 percent were covered by state programs for children, and about 17 percent were covered by Medicare, with 17 percent being uninsured.

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Drug errors affect 1 in 14 children, study says, more than was thought.

Medicine mix-ups, accidental overdoses and bad drug reactions harm about one of 14 hospitalized children, according to the first scientific test of a new detection method.

That figure is higher than earlier estimates and bolsters concerns that were already heightened by  well-publicized cases such as the accidental drug overdose of actor Dennis Quaid’s newborn twins in November.

“These data and the Dennis Quaid episode are telling us that … these kinds of errors and experiencing harm as a result of your health care is much more common than people believe,” said Dr. Charles Homer of the National Initiative for Children’s Healthcare Quality whose group helped develop the detection tool used in the study. “It’s very concerning.”

Researchers found a rate of 11 drug-related harmful events for every 100 hospitalized children. That compares with an earlier estimate of two per 100 children, based on traditional detection methods.

The new estimate translates to 7.3 percent of hospitalized children, or about 540,000 kids each year, a calculation based on government data.

Simply relying on hospital staffers to report such problems had found less than 4 percent of the problems, detected in the new study.

Patient safety experts said the problem is probably even bigger than the study suggests because it involved only a review of selected charts. Also, the study didn’t include general community hospitals, where most U.S. children requiring hospitalization are treated.

Twenty-two percent of the problems were considered preventable, but most were relatively mild. None was fatal or caused permanent damage, but some “did have the potential to cause some significant harm,” said Sharek, medical director of quality at Stanford University’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital.

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