State Hospitals Outpace Nation

 For ER Visits

STAMFORD (AP) — As patients increasingly rely on emergency room care at Connecticut hospitals, the state’s rate of ER visits is now higher than the national rate, a report says.

The number of emergency visits to the state’s 31 acute-care hospitals rose to 1.4 million, an increase of about seven percent between 2001 and 2004, according to the state Office of Health Care Access report “Studying Health Care Utilization in Connecticut.”

On average, Connecticut had 420 emergency visits for every 1,000 residents in 2003, compared with the national average of 400.

Cristine Vogel, commissioner of the Office of Health Care Access, said the uninsured probably account for some of the increase. But the data indicate that many others are increasingly dependent on emergency rooms.

“What the results did for me is just confirm what I have been hearing, and that’s that we don’t have an awful lot of capacity available in our system,” she said. “We need to, as a state, consider if there ever was a disaster or some type of surge in the need for patient care, how as a state we would deliver that care.”