Overnight emergency visits last five to six hours on average

Patients at emergency departments in several parts of Finland spend an average of five to six hours there overnight, Yle reports. At Jorvi Hospital in Espoo, the average visit in August lasted six hours and four minutes.

Yle reporters visiting Jorvi on a Wednesday evening in late September saw a man lying on the waiting-room floor, groaning loudly. Another patient offered him water. When a reporter asked a passing nurse whether she knew about the situation, the nurse nodded and went to help him.

Jorvi’s emergency department is open around the clock. The figures cover patients arriving between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. in August. Average visit times were also between five and six hours at HUS-run emergency departments across Uusimaa, and in Turku, Kuopio, Lahti and Jyväskylä. The longest average in the comparison was in Turku, at six hours and 29 minutes.

One man at Jorvi, Miika Muroma, said a relative he had accompanied from Kirkkonummi had been waiting nearly five hours after arriving at about 5.30 p.m. He called the wait unreasonable in an acute situation. Another patient, Marcos Wichert, said he had waited more than two hours to see a doctor after injuring his hand while taking down a trampoline. He suspected it was broken and had not received pain relief.

Kimmo Suojanen, the HUS Acute Medicine area chief physician responsible for Jorvi’s emergency department, said much of the time spent there involves tests and assessment, even if patients cannot see that work taking place. Staff may interpret X-rays, consult specialists or wait for blood test results. Overnight patients’ conditions can also require several time-consuming tests and procedures, he said.

Suojanen said there may sometimes be only one doctor available to assess new patients in the waiting area at night. This can happen when beds in the emergency department are crowded and other doctors are needed to care for patients there.

Maaret Castrén, a professor emerita of acute medicine and former HUS division director, said emergency department overcrowding often stems from admitted patients not being transferred to hospital wards smoothly. She said the problem is not necessarily how quickly patients are treated in the emergency department, but how quickly wards receive them. Castrén said patients should make progress within four hours.