The closure of six emergency rooms in Los Angeles over the last 18 months has increased the time it takes paramedics to get patients to hospitals, the Los Angeles Fire Department said Monday.
Fewer emergency rooms means paramedics must sometimes drive farther to deliver patients and scramble to find facilities that can accept them, officials said.
The average drive time for Los Angeles paramedics as of March 2004 was eight minutes and 23 seconds, the lowest it had been in several years.
"But now it's creeping up again because of the closures," said Capt. William N. Wells, who addressed the issue at a city Fire Commission meeting. "Instead of eight minutes away, we have to drive nine, 10, 11 minutes away."
And that's just getting ambulances to the hospitals. Because the remaining emergency rooms have more patients waiting, paramedics often have to wait longer to hand over their charges to hospital staff. Last year, city ambulances waited an average of 35 hours a day for beds to open at local hospitals. Wells said the average wait was longer this year but he did not yet have final numbers.
The increased driving and wait times not only can affect patient care but also can cause ambulances and paramedics to travel out of their designated coverage zones, leaving less protection in case of a major fire or accident, said Los Angeles Fire Chief William Bamattre.
About 28 patients a day handled by the Los Angeles Fire Department would normally have gone to the emergency rooms in East Los Angeles, Gardena, Century City, Van Nuys, Duarte and Granada Hills that have been closed. Now they must be taken to neighboring hospitals.
The situation could worsen early next year as two more emergency rooms -- at Robert F. Kennedy Medical Center in Hawthorne and Suburban Medical Center in Paramount -- are scheduled to close. That will leave Los Angeles County with 75 emergency rooms, down from 94 a decade ago.
Hospitals all over the county are now filling up faster, said Cathy Chidester, assistant director of the county's emergency services agency.
"It used to be that the times you had to wait in an emergency department were pretty much located in the inner-city area," she said. "As time has gone on, it has spread out."
Officials at the Los Angeles County Fire Department said they too have to drive farther to find open emergency rooms and have to wait longer at them, but said they did not have specific statistics.
