Spine surgery, head injuries and internal organ damage - the daily stuff of the hospital emergency room
Hospitals are big business in the US, where there are more than 7,500 of them spread across the country.Large and small, public and private, they employ more than 800,000 physicians and surgeons and nearly 2.5 million registered nurses, who attend to around 35 million patients a year. These are impressive numbers.Hospital emergency rooms serve well over 100 million people a year, which is 39 out of every 100 head of population. Most of them would be in for accidents and need immediate surgery, such as spine surgery or attention to head injuries. Broken bones and ruptured organs would be a major part of the emergency room’s daily business, I image.And so, it is perhaps not surprising that, although they will always be needing more money for their services, hospitals generated more than $535 billion in revenue last year. They are a giant industry.