How many visits does a "busy ER" have?

Nurses General Nursing

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I was wondering how many visits does a busy ER have? For example, someone told me today that they got hired at the busiest ER in my city....I checked on their website and they had 81 Thousand ER visits last year...so how many would a smaller ER have? Just wondering...

How does this compare to big cities in the USA?

Thanks!

I can't tell you per year, but I can tell you that in my last ER, a 6-bed unit, anything over 15 pts in a 12-hour shift is considered busy. I think the 24-hour record there is 54 pts.

Specializes in Emergency, Trauma.

I work in the second busiest ER in the state of Florida; we had 136,000 visits last year, and that number gets higher each year. March is always our busiest month and we broke the record of most visits for one day a few weeks ago; we saw 501 patients in a 24 hour period on a Monday from hell.

Specializes in M/S, Infectious Dieases, Pediatrics/NICU.

In our Pediatric ED they average 32 visits for a 24 hour period and one day in Feburary 08, they had 99 visits in an 15 hour period. Amazingly not one person was admitted. (it is an inner city hospital, where a PMD is unheard of.)

Aeronursenj

Specializes in Neonatal ICU (Cardiothoracic).

I think "busyness" doesn't depend so much on "visit counts," but on # of beds, admission wait times, staffing levels, etc.

I think "busyness" doesn't depend so much on "visit counts," but on # of beds, admission wait times, staffing levels, etc.

Wrong. My ER was 6 beds. We always worked up to par levels on staffing, and often didn't admit anyone. 15 pts in 12 hours is "busy".

Specializes in Neonatal ICU (Cardiothoracic).

I worked in an 80 bed Level Trauma center. It had a 1:1 trauma ratio, and a 1:4 ratio otherwise. We had between 100-120k visits a year. While we were almost always turning pts over (usually 8-10 pts per nurse per shift) I was rarely SUPER BUSY. It always depended on who was doing triage, who the docs were, and how many NAs we had. It also depended on how slow pharmacy was, and how many samples the lab had "dropped."

Specializes in Emergency & Trauma/Adult ICU.

I agree with SteveRN -- to define "busyness" you need to examine exactly what you're looking at:

average pts. per nurse at any given time?

total activity of the department (i.e. number of visits)?

In other words ... pick a number of daily visits, any number. Let's say 50.

Is that 50 patients per day in a 30-bed ER? (doesn't sound very busy)

Or is it 50 patients in a 6-bed ER? (is the picture changing?)

At a particular moment the waiting room may be full but things in the treatment area have slowed to a crawl due to inability to move admitted patients, numerous patients doing the prep for an abd CT scan, etc. At other times the waiting room may be sporificely populated, but we're hopping in the back.

Specializes in Cardiac, ER.

I agree with previous posters,..busy is a relative term,..depends on how many beds and staffing etc,...worked a community ER, 6 beds,.60 pts/24 hrs was "busy" for us,.now I work in a 25 bed ( + 10 hall beds) Trauma center (same city) and anything over 250 a day is busy! (we average 72,000/yr)

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