Most common causes for emergency room visits

Between the hours of waiting for doctors, running tests and anxiously awaiting results, there is never a truly good time to visit the emergency room. But while sitting in the waiting room, have you ever looked around you and wondered what the other people visiting the ER are there for? Riverhead LOCAL recently reached out to area hospitals to find the most common causes for visits to the ER.

On any given day, the emergency room at Eastern Long Island Hospital is bustling with doctors and nurses caring for those who are in need of medical attention. In fact, every year on average, the hospital sees over 9,000 patients in its emergency room.

“That number isn’t going down either,” said Eileen Solomon, spokeswoman for the hospital, “Especially in the summer.”

Each summer the hospital’s emergency room becomes more active, according to Soloman. People come into the ER for a variety of reasons, including lacerations, sprains, hip fractures, insect bites, broken bones and chest pain. But can you guess the number one symptom people visiting the ER during the summer complain of?

Dizziness, according to Soloman.

“People in the summer often come in because they are dizzy because they didn’t hydrate properly,” she said.

The summer is also a busy period for Peconic Bay Medical Center, which sees, on average, close to 36,000 patients in its ER each year with a steady increase from year to year.

According to the hospital, the majority of those patients visited the hospital during the summer, which is actually its busiest time of year. Breaking the numbers down further, the hospital said Mondays and Thursdays between 1:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. in the summer is when the ER is at its peek.

Similar to Eastern Long Island hospital, the top reasons people to walk into the ER at Peconic Bay are: abdominal pain, sprains/strains, fever, chest pain and difficulty breathing.

Stony Brook University Hospital ER is also highly active, seeing 90,000 patients in 2013. Unlike the other local hospitals, however, it has its busy season in the winter.
The majority of patients enter Stony Brook’s ER complaining of abdominal pain, chest pain/cardiac, respiratory problems, including shortness of breath, upper respiratory infections and asthma, back pain and fever.

Stony Brook University Hospital, Eastern Long Island hospital and Peconic Bay Hopsital all appear to be right in line with national averages if compared with a National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, which was released in 2010 and research conducted by the Center for Disease Control.

According to the National Ambulatory Medical Care survey, which looked at 357 emergency rooms across the country, top reasons for visiting the emergency room included stomach and abdominal pain, chest pain, fever, headache, back pain, shortness of breath, cough and vomiting.