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Emergency department (ED) overcrowding and long wait times have been associated with decreased quality of care and increased incidence of untoward events. The National Quality Forum recently endorsed a set of consensus standards for emergency care quality that include measures of ED wait time and visit length for admitted and discharged patients.
In a retrospective cross-sectional study, these authors used data from the 2006 National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey to examine wait time and visit length for a random sample of 35,849 patient visits to 364 U.S. EDs. Mean and median wait times were 52.4 and 34.0 (interquartile range [IQR], 22.5–47.8) minutes, respectively. Mean and median visit length were 4.9 and 4.3 (IQR, 3.3–5.6) hour…