The big game and the ER

Filed in archive Studies on September 24, 2005

A study correlates watching big sporting events with a decrease in emergency room volume. It kind of implies how non-emergent some of the ER volume really is:

Physicians at Children's Hospital Boston, who collected data from Emergency rooms in Boston during the Red Sox's run to the World Series in October 2004, found that patient volume dipped significantly during the most important postseason contests.

The authors used the Nielsen television ratings to determine the magnitude of a sporting contest: the higher the rating, the more important they considered the game. The findings, published in today's edition of Annals of Emergency Medicine, indicate that the games with the highest Nielsen television ratings --- Game 4 of the World Series and Game 7 of the American League Championship Series, both of which were series-clinching contests for the Red Sox --- were associated with lower emergency department volume than games with lower television viewership.

Based on their data, the authors believe that one can predict how busy an emergency room will be based on how "big" the game is. This does not come as a surprise to many emergency medicine physicians, who have found they see far fewer patients in their hospitals at times when there is a major sporting event being played.