Emergency Room Visits in Southern California Increase

A board-certified emergency medicine physician, Zachary Lutsky, MD, practices in Southern California. Dr. Zachary Lutsky began his career as an emergency medical technician at UCLA Medical Center, Santa Monica, and has since been on staff at such hospitals as Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

Between 2006 and 2016, emergency department visits in California increased by about 4 percent each year. Meanwhile, from 2010 to 2016, emergency department visits in Southern California increased by 27 percent. During that same time, the area’s population grew only by 5 percent, so the increase in ER visits wasn’t solely the result of a population increase.

Instead, the rise in emergency department visits has been attributed to the higher number of insured individuals in Southern California. In Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Los Angeles counties, Medi-Cal recipients went from being 25 percent of emergency room users to being around 50 percent of users. Plus, the number of uninsured ER visitors dropped from 18 to 8 percent.

Of those who visited the ER, many were homeless with mental health conditions. Unfortunately, the entire state has too few beds in psychiatric and drug rehabilitation facilities. As a result, people with these issues are looking to sleep in emergency departments rather than these other facilities.

Despite this increase in ER visits in Southern California, the average wait time to see an emergency department health care professional improved slightly from 2013 to 2016. Still, emergency waits in the state as a whole are roughly an hour longer than national wait times. Fewer patients were also admitted to Southern California hospitals, suggesting that they were effectively treated in the ER and released.