Myth: Emergency room overcrowding is caused by non-urgent cases.

According to critics, patients with minor problems take up limited emergency room (ER) resources and create backlogs, leaving the sickest patients at risk of facing unreasonable and unsafe waits for potentially life-saving care. If this were true, then clearing the backlog would depend on diverting non-urgent patients away from the ER and increasing the number of primary care doctors available to these patients. In reality, though, research shows these to be simplistic strategies that fail to address the multidimensional and complex causes of ER overcrowding.