Emergency care gets a low grade in ACEP report

January 23, 2014

Credentialing Resource Center Digest - Volume 15 Issue 4

Quality emergency care availability is threatened by a wide range of factors, including shrinking capacity and an ever-increasing demand for services, according to “America’s Emergency Care Environment, A State-by-State Report Card,” released by the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP). Even as more Americans come to rely on emergency departments for their acute care needs, such care will increasingly become harder to access, the report states. The ACEP Report Card, which rates the overall environment in which the emergency care system operates, gives U.S. emergency care a D+, poorer than 2009’s grade of C-. The District of Columbia ranked first in the 2014 report; Wyoming ranked last in the nation.

ACEP assessed the emergency care environments in each state as well as whether government policies are supportive of emergency care in five categories:

• Access to emergency care: D-

• Quality and patient safety environment: C

• Medical liability environment: C-

• Public health and injury prevention: C

• Disaster preparedness: C-

Emergency physicians today mobilize resources to diagnose and treat every kind of medical emergency and set the course of care for their patients by coordinating with on-call specialists and other healthcare providers. Care that used to be provided on inpatient floors now is being done in emergency departments, often saving significant hospitalization costs.

Source: ACEP