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There’s nothing fun about a visit to the emergency room — whatever brings you there. But it’s even less pleasant when the emergency room is overcrowded and you end up waiting hours for the urgent care you need, and hours longer if you need to be admitted to the hospital.
In California, emergency room patients more likely than not encounter that situation. In 2017, the median wait time for patients before admission to hospitals was 336 minutes, or more than 5½ hours. For patients discharged without admission, the wait time was more than 2½ hours.