Emergency care waits found to be on rise

Washington Post, January 15, 2008

Half of all emergency room patients waited 30 minutes or more before being examined by a doctor in 2004, a 36 percent increase from a median wait time of 22 minutes in 1997, according to a study by researchers at Harvard Medical School. The trend is a potentially deadly result of the shrinking number of emergency departments and rising demand for emergency services, researchers said.