FACTS & FIGURES: Emergency Room Statistics

• Emergency Department visits grew by 26 percent between 1993 and 2003. But over the same period, the number of EDs declined by 425, and the number of hospital beds declined by 198,000.
• There were 113.9 million Emergency Room visits in 2003 up 26% from 90.3 million a decade earlier.
• General symptoms such as fever, fatigue, and pain accounted for 15.6 percent of Emergency Department visits, followed by musculoskeletal symptoms 13,8%, digestive symptoms 13.7%, and respiratory symptoms 10.7%.
• Over 2 million patients were transferred to other facilities, while 317,000 patients were dead on arrival or died in the Emergency Room.
• Hospital-acquired infections kill about 90,000 patients annually.  This is an increased of 36% since 1980, a rise that coincides with the creation of bacteria capable of resisting the most potent antibiotics, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
• An average visit to an Emergency Room costs $383. (New England Journal of Medicine, “The Costs of Visits to Emergency Departments,” 1996).
   
  The average physician’s office visit costs $60. (American Medical Association, “Physician Socioeconomic Statistics,” 2001).
• Children make up 27 percent of all emergency department visits, but only 6% of Emergency Departments in the U.S. have all of the necessary supplies for pediatric emergencies.
• Despite increased visits, the wait time to see a doctor was unchanged since 2000, averaging 46.5 minutes. Overall, visitors spent an average of 3.2 hours in the Emergency Room.
• The number of adults aged 22-49 who visited an Emergency Room increased 19 percent. Emergency Room visits by Americans aged 50-64 grew 15 percent.
• Some 1.7 million visits were for adverse effects of medical treatment.

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