When a big match is on TV emergency room visits plummet

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Main Category: Public Health
Article Date: 26 Sep 2005 - 18:00 PDT

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Investigators from Children's Hospital Boston, USA, have found that when there is a major sporting event on TV, hospital emergency departments experience a lull. They found that the bigger the televised event, the bigger the lull.

You can read about this study in the October issue of Annals of Emergency Medicine.

Health professionals already knew about the relationship between the number of emergency hospital visits and big matches on TV, researchers from the Children's Hospital Boston have been the first to actually quantify the magnitude of the events by using Nielsen TV ratings. According to their results, the higher the ratings, the quieter the ER departments are.

The researchers borrowed information from a real-time disease surveillance system which the Children's hospital uses. They tracked the visits during each of the American League Championship Series and World Series games. They tracked the visits in six ER departments in the Boston area. They then compared the ER visits against the Nielsen TV ratings (this shows total viewers).

Annals of Emergency Medicine.
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