If you’re waiting to see an emergency room doctor, you might want to make yourself comfortable.

A report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month said the average waiting time in an emergency department is 56 minutes.

Locally, however, emergency wait times are much shorter.

Emergency room patients at Meeker Memorial Hospital in Litchfield and Hutchinson Area Health Care in Hutchinson wait, on average, less than 15 minutes before seeing a doctor.

Meeker Memorial Emergency Room Director Dr. David Ross attributes the shorter wait times to a simple fact: Local hospitals do not have the same patient volumes as large metro facilities.

“It’s a numbers game,” he said.

During medical school, Ross spent six weeks in Hennepin County Medical Center’s emergency department. He remembers times when all the emergency rooms were full and 150 patients were waiting in triage to be seen.

MMH Outpatient Nurse Manager Sharon Then said larger facilities also must set aside more beds for possible trauma patients. She noted that MMH has seen a reduced number of trauma patients over the years due to auto-launch helicopters that transport patients straight from a scene to a trauma facility, thus cutting out the middle man local hospital.

It also takes larger hospitals longer to admit patients from the emergency room into the hospital, Then said. Therefore, some patients at those facilities are left waiting on an ER bed until a room upstairs becomes available.

Nationwide, the length of time a patient waits before seeing an ER physician has grown steadily over the years. Ten years ago, patients waited an average of 38 minutes in an emergency room waiting room. By 2004, that number had increased to 47 minutes.

Read more about the emergency department services offered at Meeker Memorial Hospital and Hutchinson Area Health Care in the Sept. 4 print edition.