This wait time is sickening.
The average emergency room patient at Kings County Hospital Center waited a whopping 113 minutes before being seen by a doctor in 2013, the Daily News has learned.
The nearly two-hour wait at the Central Brooklyn medical center is one of the longest among city hospitals — and nearly quadruple the national average, data shows.
But for more than 50 patients splayed across Kings County Hospital’s ER waiting room Tuesday, the grueling wait appeared much longer than 113 minutes.
“I’ve been here since this morning,” said a flustered James McPhatter, 65, who arrived at the hospital around 11 a.m. after his vision suddenly became blurry, only to wait for four hours. “They’re waiting for the doctor to come down.”
The long wait, revealed through a Freedom of Information Law request, is worse for patients seeking to land a room at the scandal-scarred hospital, where in 2008 a 49-year-old woman died on the floor of the psychiatric emergency room after waiting more than 24 hours to be treated by doctors.
A year later, the city agreed to pay Esmin Elizabeth Green’s family $2 million and promised sweeping reforms.
“We certainly don’t want to see another wrongful death,” said the family’s lawyer, Sanford Rubenstein. “Administrators at Kings County must take action to significantly reduce this waiting time.”
During the first part of 2013, it took nearly 10 hours, on average, to land a regular room at Kings County, according to data by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services first released in a ProPublica report last year.
And the average ER wait time spiked from 103 minutes in 2012 to 113 in 2013, city records show.
The hospital, which serves some of Brooklyn’s poorest residents, reorganized part of its emergency department to improve patient flow and will open a new observation unit, said Health and Hospitals Corp. spokesman Ian Michaels.
Overall wait times at the city’s 11 public hospitals dropped from an average of 76 minutes in 2012 to 51 minutes in 2013. That occurred as the number of patients increased from 1.10 million in 2012 to 1.14 million in 2013.
“We’re very pleased that our overall efforts to reduce wait times are helping New Yorkers,” Michaels said.
The union representing state nurses was less impressed.
“It’s clear that Brooklyn needs more healthcare resources, not fewer,” said New York State Nurses Association executive director Jill Furillo.
rblau@nydailynews.com
