As lawmakers and hospitals battled over state health care funding, patients in the Rochester area faced some of the longest emergency room wait times in New York, federal data show.
While state budget debates prioritized closing Medicaid funding gaps to shore up safety-net hospitals, wait times at emergency rooms in Monroe County continued to rise, reaching an average of 274 minutes between July 2022 and July 2023, the most recent federal data show.
In other words, hospitals in Monroe ranked fourth-worst in the state for delivering timely emergency room care last year, while New York overall had an average ER wait time of 204 minutes, well above the national average of 161 minutes, federal data show.
Where are ER wait times getting longer
What follows is the average time patients spent in emergency rooms before leaving the visit across the Finger Lakes from summer 2022 to summer 2023. It represents minutes and the lower the number, the shorter the wait. The percentage change is a comparison to the prior year.
- F.F. Thompson Hospital in Canandaigua: 206, up 6%
- Geneva General Hospital: 157, a 2% decrease
- Highland Hospital in Rochester: 312, up 12%
- Newark-Wayne Community Hospital: 217, a nearly 14% jump
- Nicholas H. Noyes Memorial Hospital in Dansville: 206, flat
- Rochester General Hospital: 221, up 3%
- Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester: 258, a 16% spike.
- Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hospital in Penn Yan: 94, flat
- Unity Hospital in Greece: 307, a 14% jump
Similar to Monroe (274 minutes), several comparable upstate metros clocked in even worse, with Albany County at the longest ER waits in New York (349 minutes) and Schenectady County ranked second-worst (336 minutes). Onondaga County had the third-longest waits (287 minutes).
By contrast, Erie County ER waits averaged 227 minutes and Westchester County had an average wait of about 201 minutes.
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What hospitals are doing to reduce ER wait times
Still, some health systems have taken steps to boost ER staffing ratios and expand ER capacity.
Rochester's Strong Memorial Hospital, for example, is in the midst of a $557 million construction project, including tripling the size of its ER. The project was awarded $50 million in state Health Care Facility Transformation Program funds and expects to finish by 2027, with newly constructed ER space opening in 2026.
Other hospitals statewide are working with state officials to address the fact children and older adults living with medically complex or behavioral health conditions experienced the most frequent and longest hospital discharge delays.
Further, nursing home backlogs and insufficient community care options fueled many of the discharge delays. Other factors driving ER wait times up included insurance coverage gaps, affordability issues and governmental approval lags, hospital groups noted.
Meanwhile, the lack of routine care for poor and low-income New Yorkers — and those with lower educational attainment and other societal disadvantages, such as primary care deserts — was driving preventable emergency room visits, federal studies show.
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