Some Emergency Rooms in Oregon Have Visit Times Much Longer Than the National Average

The national average for emergency room stays in “high-volume” hospitals is around three and a half hours. Stay times at Oregon’s slowest emergency rooms, including several in the Portland area, far exceed that. And this trend is getting worse.

A. WW An analysis of the latest data from the federal Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services found that PeaceHealth’s RiverBend facility in Springfield and several Oregon Health & Science University-affiliated hospitals top a list of slow emergency rooms that have deteriorated significantly in recent years.

The data, compiled by the federal regulator from a sample of patient records, comes with a caveat: It’s not a measure of wait times, but rather the total time patients spent in the emergency room before leaving (including sitting in the waiting room).

Still, the agency warns that extended stays are a possible sign of understaffing or overcrowding and “can lead to delays in treatment and further suffering for those waiting.” (More recent figures aren’t yet available, but representatives from hospital systems say wait times have dropped since then.)

The Oregon Nursing Association has been collecting horror stories from patients since the late 2023 closure of PeaceHealth’s Eugene hospital led to backups at nearby RiverBend.

“My mother waited 8 hours in the RiverBend emergency room. We talked to people who waited in the waiting room for NINETEEN hours! one person wrote in response to a survey distributed by the union in September.

Pressing for staff increases, hospital employee and union leader Dr. Charlotte Yeomans adds: “Waiting times are traumatic. “They fundamentally change the way our patients feel about the care they receive in the hospital.”

But the two worst hospitals in the state are WWThe analysis of 2023 data ties into the system’s Pill Hill flagship, OHSU, and its Hillsboro outpost, where it took over clinical care in 2016.

Representatives of both say they are implementing new strategies to reduce time spent in the emergency room. (OHSU leaders said earlier this year that one such strategy was to send patients to Hillsboro.)

Ultimately, they say, the problem boils down to simple math: Demand for a limited supply of beds is increasing.

“OHSU provides the most complex care in the state,” says spokesman Erik Robinson. “Given the overall high demand, OHSU Hospital is fully booked.”