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.