Post by Joe Cocker on Jan 18, 2014 12:45:08 GMT -5
An updated national report on U.S. emergency medical care has again awarded California an “F” for lacking access to speedy treatment, noting that the state has the lowest number of hospital emergency rooms per capita — 6.7 per 1 million people — in the nation.
The America’s Emergency Care Environment report card, which gauges how well states support emergency care, was released Thursday by the American College of Emergency Physicians, an advocacy group.
Tracking 136 measures from sources including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the organization called overcrowding in California emergency wards a “critical problem” and urged the state to increase its healthcare workforce and beef up a variety of facilities to reduce high wait-times for emergency services.
On average, Californians who were admitted into the hospital after visiting an emergency room waited more than five and a half hours from the time they arrived in the ER to the time they left it, the report said.
The state also had a shortage of inpatient and psychiatric beds in hospitals — another squeeze on emergency departments, which often “board” incoming patients until they can be routed to the correct hospital department, further restricting emergency care capacity.
The analysis arrives on the heels of Obamacare reforms designed to cut costs and improve results by steering patients away from visiting emergency rooms for routine care and guiding them instead to primary-care “medical homes” to manage chronic problems.
In theory, that could open up capacity for patients who require intensive urgent care. But there’s little reason to think implementation of the Affordable Care Act will ease the multitude of pressures emergency departments face, some physicians warned.
A study published Jan. 2 in the online edition of the journal Science found that ER use increased among low-income Oregonians who received government healthcare coverage through a Medicaid expansion program in that sta
www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-state-lacking-er-capacity-20140115,0,1969596.story#ixzz2qm06zEIP
