It appears that the number of Americans visiting hospitals’ emergency rooms increased in 2006, as well as the time spent in there according to a report released on Wednesday by the National Center for Health Statistics, a division of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

More exactly, the number of visits to physicians offices and hospital outpatient and emergency department increased by 26 percent from 1996 to 2006, an average of four visits per person per year, the report showed. Two thousand and six was the most recent year from which complete data was available.

Overall, there were about 119 million visits in the emergency rooms in 2006 up from 90 million in 1996, meaning a 32 percent increase. A reason for this increase is the fact that the population in aging and most of the elderly use emergency rooms as their first stop for health care, instead if making an appointment at a doctor’s office, Catharine Burt, chief of hospital research at the National Center for Health Statistics in Hyattsville, Maryland explained.

“The emergency-room visits continue to grow and grow, and the number of emergency-room beds is shrinking. Some doctors won’t take Medicaid at all, so the patients have no choice but to go to the hospital setting for their care,” she said.

In fact, more Medicaid people visited emergency rooms than patients with private insurance (82 per 100 people versus 21 per 100 people).

“The uninsured have long been more frequent users of (emergency rooms). That's not new. What's new is the rise ... in frequency in visits, and that's occurring in the insured,” said Dr. Stephen Pitts, author of the report and a CDC fellow who teaches emergency medicine at Emory University’s School of Medicine.

The report also revealed that the average wait increased as well by almost half to 56 minutes in 2006 from 38 minutes a decade earlier. This finding can be explained by the fact that more patients are going to a declining number of hospital emergency departments. The limited number of beds and a shortage of surgical specialists also contribute to this unfortunate situation.

The elderly coming to the emergency rooms usually suffered from chest pain, abdominal pain, back pain, headache, and shortness of breath, the report found. As for children under 15, they usually suffered from fever, cough, vomiting, earache and injuries to the head, neck and face. Children had the highest emergency room visit rate, followed by people over 75.

There was also a 43 percent increase in visits to emergency rooms made by adults over 18 years with chronic diabetes and a 51 percent increase in visits for chronic high blood pressure.

When looking at the race of people visiting the emergency rooms, the report did not find a significant difference between African American and whites. However, African American preferred emergency rooms rather than going to an office-based surgical or a medical specialist.