A service that is badly called: the “emergencies”, where the French spend more and more time, according to a report by the DREES published this Wednesday, March 19. In the medium duration, in 2023, half of the patients spent three hours in this service, 45 minutes more than ten years.
More precisely, the DREES registered the time that passed between the moment when patients are registered administratively and the time they are really leaving the service.
“We can say that patients stayed longer in the emergency room in 2023 than in 2013. In 2013. Half of the patients remained more than 2:15 in emergencies and is more than 3 hours in 2023. Therefore, there is a fairly clear increase in the duration of the passage of the approval of the patients also increased significantly significantly”, analyzed with BFMTV demoly, emergency passage manager.
If it is a median, times can be much longer. For 15% of patients, more than one in ten people, the emergency period is “more than 8 hours, against 9% in 2013” according to this study.
“Traffic Traffic Effect”
How to explain this spectacular flight? Several factors are advanced. On the one hand, a decrease in access to the offer of care outside the use of emergencies that forces patients to pass the doors of these services, while certain ailments could have been handled in city medicine. But also a change in the profiles of the sick.
“Above all, there is an evolution of patients who are now older, polypatological, who no longer need hospitalization care and in 10 years we have seen the evolution of the medical demography of these patients and the impact of the closures of the bed with a cruel lack of bed after the bed after the emergency bed at the Hospital of the University of Rennes.
The manager of the DREES project also points out that the more a service can accommodate people, the more the waiting time increases. “When you receive more patients, you can have more traffic jam phenomenon, many patients at a given time that makes care have a little more time,” he says.
Waiting hours on stretchers
Part of the explanation of waiting time in the emergency room is also the difficulty of obtaining beds to hospitalize patients. “This is really our priority today: preventing patients from staying in stretchers for hours and we know that this time of transition to the emergency room considerably increased the mortality of those over 75 years,” said Dr. Soulat.
A French study published in November 2023 told us, for example, that a last night on an emergency stretcher increases the risk of mortality by more than 75s by 40%. According to this March study, average emergency mortality is one in every thousand (0.1%) “rare” cases.
Source: BFM TV
