Visits to the emergency room are longer than ten years ago, whether the patient is examined only once, examined using radiology and medical biology, or hospitalized at the end, indicates a study by the Drees published Monday June 1.
On a normal weekday in 2023, the median duration between the administrative registration of the patient and their discharge reached 3 hours 10 minutes, compared to 2 hours 15 minutes in 2013, according to this study by the statistical services of the social ministries. Some patients (almost one in five) only need a single consultation with the doctor, without special care or technical examination. Half of them then come out in less than 1 hour 35 minutes. That’s 20 minutes more than ten years ago.
For patients who have benefited from both care and use of the technical platform (x-ray, scanner, biology, etc.), without being hospitalized at the end, the median duration is 3 hours 55 minutes, i.e. 1 hour 15 minutes more than in 2013. The wait is even longer for those who must be hospitalized (one in six patients): half spend 6 hours 30 minutes in the emergency room or more, or 1 hour 45 minutes more than in 2013.
Around 9% of patients are admitted to a short-term hospitalization unit (UHCD) within the emergency room, to be monitored, undergo additional examinations or to wait for a downstream bed in another department. For them, the median duration increases to 17:30 hours (+2 hours 40 minutes compared to 2013). The duration of passage also increases with the attendance of the establishment: among patients neither hospitalized nor admitted to UHCD for example, the median reaches 1 hour 45 minutes in small departments (less than 40 daily passages) compared to 3 hours 15 minutes in the largest (more than 120 passages).
Methodology: a national photograph
In a second study, Drees analyzed the duration in the waiting room before the first assessment, which makes it possible to sort patients according to the degree of severity: less than 8 minutes for half of the patients, but more than 30 minutes for one in ten people.
Between arrival and the start of care, less than half an hour passes for half of the patients, but one in 10 must wait 2.5 hours or more. These data are not representative of peaks of activity (winter epidemics, heatwaves, Mondays, etc.). These new analyzes were carried out using data from the “Emergency Survey”, carried out on the second Tuesday of June in 2013 as in 2023, in all French general and pediatric emergency services, excluding Mayotte, with the support in particular of the emergency doctors unions SUDF and Amuf.
