The last thing you want to hear in the emergency room when you’ve got crushing chest pain or can’t breathe is that you have to wait before you can get treatment. Unfortunately, in too many instances, that’s exactly what’s happening. In fact, new research found that waiting times in emergency rooms have increased by 36 percent for all patients, to an average of 30 minutes per patient. And the sickest sometimes have to wait the longest: As many as one-quarter of all heart attack patients had to wait 50 minutes or longer before seeing a doctor. Study author Dr. Andrew Wilper, a fellow in general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and an internist with the Cambridge Health Alliance, reports in the Jan. 15 online issue ofHealth Affairsthat the increasing wait times are the result of a ‘perfect storm’ that has occurred as emergency room visits are on the rise while many ERs are closing their doors. ‘It’s hard to ignore the fact that several hundred ERs have closed their doors, and we’ve seen an increase in the number of patients using ERs. Plus, there are a number of internal factors contributing like bottlenecks because of a […]