Anyone who has suffered a broken bone knows how painful it can be. Long bone fractures—those involving arms and legs—are common among children. Any parent wants to spare his or her kid from the intense pain of such an injury, but a recent study published in Academic Emergency Medicine has bad news in that regard.

Thanks to the crowded conditions in hospital emergency rooms, administering pain medication to children with long bone fractures is less effective and not as timely as it should be.

Researchers from the University of Colorado School of Medicine studied 1,229 patients treated in the emergency department of an academic children’s hospital for one year. They found that patients were 4 to 47 percent less likely to receive timely care and 3 to 17 percent less likely to receive effective care when the ER was crowded.