Although it seems incredibly gruesome, a recent study found that heart patients have to wait the longest to receive assistance in the emergency room. Twenty-five percent of the time, heart patients were forced to wait at least an hour before someone came to their aid. Considering that the chances of survival from a heart attack go down exponentially the longer you wait for treatment, this is definitely cause for concern.
The study was conducted over a period of seven years, from 1997 to 2004. They found that during this time period, visits to the emergency room increased overall and most patients were forced to wait. In fact, over the length of the study, they found that overall wait times were increased by thirty-five percent for all patients.
In increasingly busier emergency rooms, nurses are forced to triage patients. Those who are deemed to be near death can expect to wait at least fourteen minutes to get treatment. For some reason however, heart attack patients are generally not deemed to be in this group. Overall, heart attack patients had to wait 150% longer for care by 2004 than they did in 1997. At least one in every four patients was waiting at least an hour for treatment by the time the study concluded.
