California earns F for timely ER treatments
By Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times
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 fewest 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 advocacy group American College of Emergency Physicians. 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 long waits 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.
Couldn’t be due to the fact they have to deal with so many people that go to the emergency room for non emergency problems taking time away from people with real emergencies.
The good news is if you arrive in an ambulance with symptoms of heart attack, they zip you right in.
The bad news is you have to call 911 and appear to be having a heart attack to get that kind of service.
(Yes, Dean, ERs are badly clogged with non-emergency patients who have no other access to medical care — something I hope and trust the Affordable Care Act will help to reduce or eliminate.)
Still, if you find yourself sitting or lying around in a waiting room or hallway, count yourself lucky. You really don’t want to be the one being rushed past everyone else and getting all manner of attention. Having the medical people all worked up and focused on you means something bad is happening to you.