2-hr. wait for ER doc longest in N.Y.

THE WAIT TIME for the emergency room at Elmhurst Hospital Center is in critical condition.

The average emergency room patient at the Queens facility (photo) waited 114 minutes to be seen by a doctor in 2016, according to records obtained by the Daily News.

The nearly two-hour delay was the lengthiest recorded at any of the city’s 11 public hospitals in at least the last five years — and close to four times as long as the national average of 30 minutes, according to data for 2014 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

For some of the patients, the wait is actually longer than two hours. “It’s ridiculous!” said a flustered Eric Holmes, 36, as he walked out of Elmhurst’s emergency room on crutches around 6 p.m. Tuesday.

Holmes, from Astoria, Queens, got to the ER at 1:45 p.m. and waited over three hours before a doctor checked out his injured knee.

“I had to literally get on somebody’s nerves just to be seen,” Holmes said.

The extensive delays last year, exposed through a request under the Freedom of Information Law, may have actually been longer than the reported average.

That’s because the monthly wait times from April to July were never recorded due to what the hospital called “an information-gathering process transition.”

Hospital staff attributed the lengthy delays to a lack of nurses.

At times, one nurse is responsible for up to 12 patients, said Pattie-Dean Thompson, an ER nurse.

“That leaves us running from patient to patient,” she said.

Another issue is the large number of patients with minor ailments flooding the emergency room.

The long wait time comes as the number of emergency room patients at the public hospital has decreased, records show.

Elmhurst has seen a 9.4% drop in the number of emergency patients over the past five years — from 150,588 in 2012 to 136,371 in 2016, records show.

City officials say the lengthy waits last year were due to staff “documentation and technology” training.

In an effort to reduce lines, the city is in the early stages of renovating and expanding the Elmhurst adult emergency room, interim President Stanley Brezenoff testified at a City Council budget hearing in March.

Meanwhile, the wait time has improved over the first five months of this year, hospital officials said.

It took an average of 76 minutes to see a doctor in March, according to city Health and Hospitals, which oversees the city’s public hospitals.

“We are pleased that our efforts have significantly reduced the time our patients wait in the Emergency Department before being seen by a provider,” spokesman Robert de Luna said in a statement.

People with serious medical issues were seen by a doctor in under 20 minutes, de Luna said.