On a normal weekday in 2023, the median time between the administrative registration of the patient and their discharge reached 3 hours 10 minutes, compared to 2 hours 15 minutes in 2013, according to this study by the statistical services of the social ministries.
A portion of patients (almost one in five) require only a single consultation with the doctor, without any special treatment or technical examination. Half of them leave in less than 1 hour and 35 minutes. That's 20 minutes longer than ten years ago.
1 hour 15 minutes longer than in 2013
For patients who received both care and access to technical facilities (radiography, scan, biology, etc.), without being hospitalized at the end, the median duration was 3 hours 55 minutes, which is 1 hour 15 minutes longer than in 2013.
The wait is even longer for those who need to be hospitalized (one in six patients): half spend 6 hours 30 minutes or more in the emergency room, which is 1 hour 45 minutes more than in 2013.
Approximately 91% of patients are admitted to the short-stay hospitalization unit (UHCD) within the emergency department for monitoring, further examinations, or to wait for a bed in another department. For them, the median length of stay increases to 17 hours 30 minutes (+2 hours 40 minutes compared to 2013).
The duration of the visit also increases with the frequency of visits to the facility: for patients neither hospitalized nor admitted to UHCD, for example, the median reaches 1 hour 45 minutes in small departments (less than 40 daily visits) compared to 3 hours 15 minutes in the largest (more than 120 visits).
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One in ten people spends more than 30 minutes in the waiting room.
In a second study, Drees analyzed the time spent in the waiting room before the first assessment, which allows patients to be sorted according to the degree of severity: less than 8 minutes for half of the patients, but more than 30 minutes for one in ten.
Between arrival and the start of treatment, less than half an hour elapses for half of the patients, but one in ten has to wait 2.5 hours or more. These figures are not representative of peak activity periods (winter epidemics, heat waves, Mondays, etc.).
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These new analyses were carried out using data from the "Emergency Survey", conducted on the second Tuesday of June in 2013 as in 2023, in all French general and pediatric emergency departments, excluding Mayotte, with the support in particular of the emergency physicians' unions SUDF and Amuf.
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