This is shown by statistics from the National Board of Health and Welfare, which were presented on Tuesday.
If you look at the statistics on waiting times for doctors in the Östergötland region for people aged 19 and over, the bar graph shows the clear trend.
Vrinnevisikhuset in Norrköping has significantly longer waiting times, compared to the hospital in Motala and the University Hospital in Linköping.
Drastic increase in 2021
Figures from 2017 until 2021 show that waiting times peak in 2021. In the past five years, the waiting time for a doctor at the emergency department in Norrköping has never been so long.
For all visits, the median waiting time for a doctor is 78 minutes at Vrinnevisjukhuset.
The corresponding figure at the University Hospital in Linköping is 50 minutes and the lowest is the waiting time for an appointment with a doctor in Motala, where the median time is 42 minutes.
It can be compared with the waiting times for doctors in 2019, before the pandemic, when the corresponding median time at the emergency department in Norrköping was 68 minutes, which is still significantly higher than the corresponding figure for the University Hospital, which was then 52 minutes.
Decreasing waiting time on Gotland
At the emergency department in Visby, the waiting times for doctors, for people aged 19 and over, have instead decreased.
Here, the median time is 52 minutes in 2021 compared to 60 minutes in 2019.