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Dallas Hospital Has Nation’s Busiest ER

Dallas Has Nation's Busiest ER
Red emergency room sign on the side of hospital | Image by cvm/Shutterstock

A local hospital has the nation’s busiest emergency room, according to a study by Nice Rx Health.

Parkland Health and Hospital System in Dallas reported the most ER visits in 2021, with a total of 210,152 that year.

This number is nearly 20,000 more than the next ER on the list, Lakeland Regional Health Medical Center in Florida, which had 190,581 visits that year.

Three other North Texas hospitals joined Parkland on the list of the 30 busiest emergency rooms in the nation. This includes Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital in Fort Worth at No.6 with 142,330 visits, John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth at No.14 with 117,956 visits, and Children’s Medical Center in Dallas at No.24 with 104,078 visits.

Based on statistics gathered for the month of December 2021, the most frequent reasons for a visit to the ER nationwide were maternal and neonatal conditions (519,500), surgeries (412,800), and COVID-19 (197,500).

The least common reasons tracked for visits in December 2021 were influenza (4,500), injuries (103,300), and mental health and substance abuse disorders (116,300).

As the health crisis of obesity continues to escalate across America, as frequently reported in The Dallas Express, it has increased the strain on emergency rooms across the nation. A study published by the National Library of Medicine noted that overweight patients “have higher emergency room utilization rates, longer lengths of stay, and face increased misdiagnosis risk.”

Another study, published in the Journal of Anesthesiology, Analgesia and Critical Care, stated, “People with severe obesity may be seriously disadvantaged in emergency health care settings, and this condition is enhanced during the COVID-19 pandemic, when obesity was stated as one of the most frequent comorbidit[ies]. Emergency in critical obese patients turns out to be an intellectual, procedural, and technical challenge.”

In addition to housing the busiest ER in the country, Dallas has one of the highest rates of obesity of any major U.S. city, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.

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