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Red Sox fever impacts hospital ED visits

Quality Improvement Monitor, September 29, 2005

Perhaps baseball is more than just a game, and that sentiment may impact business at the local ED, according to a study in the September 26 Annals of Emergency Medicine.

Traffic in six Boston-area EDs dropped about 15% below expected volume while the Boston Red Sox faced the New York Yankees in Game 7 of the 2004 American League Championship Series (ALCS) and the St. Louis Cardinals in Game 4 of the World Series, according to the study. In contrast, ED visits were about 15% above expected levels during games 3 and 4 of the ALCS, when the Red Sox faced elimination.

"The public health finding here is people use discretion in deciding when show up in the emergency department," says senior study author Kenneth Mandl, MD, an attending physician in Children's Hospital Boston emergency medicine department.

Researchers at Children's used television Nielsen ratings to determine how many people were watching the games, and then evaluated the average number of ED visits during the playoff games.

 

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