Connecticut’s emergency department boarding rates declined to 38.1% in 2025 from 38.7% in 2024, even as patient volumes increased, according to a public dashboard from the Connecticut College of Emergency Physicians.
The dashboard, launched with 2024 data and later updated to add 2025 data, includes hospital boarding statistics such as total patients treated and admitted, average wait times and boarding percentages. Hospital boarding — keeping patients physically in the emergency department after a decision to admit — remains a persistent operational challenge nationwide.
Connecticut became the first state in 2023 to require hospitals to report emergency department boarding data annually through 2029, aiming to bring greater visibility to crowding and delays.
In 2025, the state’s emergency departments treated 1,669,184 patients, up from 1,663,899 in 2024. Admissions also rose to 237,085 from 228,180, while the share of admitted patients boarding for four hours or more fell by 0.6 percentage points year over year.
At the hospital level, Hartford (Conn.) Hospital, an academic level 1 trauma center with 867 beds, reported the highest boarding rate at 62% in 2025, down from 63.1% in 2024. The hospital treated 109,166 emergency patients and admitted 28,322, with an average time of 8.9 hours from emergency department arrival to admit order.
By comparison, Saint Francis Hospital in Hartford, a 617-bed teaching hospital owned by Trinity Health of New England and one of three level 1 trauma centers in the state, reported the second-highest boarding rate at 58.4% in 2025, down from 62.2% in 2024. The hospital treated 64,598 emergency patients and admitted 14,444, with an average time of 4.9 hours from arrival to admit order.
In contrast, Connecticut Children’s, an independent nonprofit pediatric acute care hospital with 205 beds based in Hartford, reported the lowest boarding rate at 4.6% in 2025, down from 10.5% in 2024. The hospital treated 58,081 emergency patients, with an average of 4.9 hours from arrival to admit order.
Connecticut’s progress comes as national data show boarding times worsening across U.S. hospitals.
National data shows more than 25% of patients waited four hours or more for an inpatient bed in recent years, with that figure rising to 35% during peak winter months. By 2024, nearly 5% of patients admitted during peak months waited at least a full day for a bed, versus about 2.6% in off-peak months.
A multihospital analysis published in Health Affairs, examining about 46 million emergency department visits that led to hospitalization across roughly 1,500 hospitals from 2017 through September 2024, found boarding times have steadily increased. The study also showed a growing share of patients are waiting well beyond the four-hour benchmark for an inpatient bed.
In March 2025, an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality report highlighted several approaches to address overcrowding and boarding in emergency departments, such as surgical smoothing, streamlining discharges and the use of inpatient bed managers to oversee bed assignments. In addition, addressing boarding at scale will likely require broader policy changes, including regulatory support and new reimbursement models.
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