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United States Gets A ‘D’ In ‘Emergency Medical Care’

By Kamal Nayan | Update Date: Jan 20, 2014 09:03 AM EST

A report card issued by the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) ranked United States a 'D' when it comes to emergency medical services. 

The report card, which was released Thursday also gave grades to individual states based on their performance on delivering emergency care. The organization pointed that the emergency care in the US has only worsened in the past few years. ACEP had given US a C-minus in a similar report issued three years back. 

"This report card is saying: The nation's policies are failing to support emergency patients," Alexander Rosenau, president of the ACEP, told CNN.

ACEP, on its official website, bids as the "oldest and largest national medical specialty organization representing physicians who practice emergency medicine."

The report card issued doesn't name hospitals and physicians individually but it did assess the states in five different categories namely : Access to Emergency Care, the Quality and Patient Safety Environment, the Medical Liability Environment, Public Health and Injury Prevention, and Disaster Preparedness.

"If I'm in a car crash and they bring me to hospital that's not ready for me, my chances of survival are less," said Dr. Jon Mark Hirshon, an emergency physician at the University of Maryland and ACEP board member, according to RedOrbit. "So you want a state that has that type of trauma system. And when you look at patient safety, that's one of the components of patient safety."

"You can have the best medicine in the world, but it won't matter if people can't get to it."

The report found that in 2010, per minute there were 247 visits in the emergency room that included 38 million visits related to injury. 

"We'll be asked to do more with less resources, which has the potential to impact emergency patients," Hirshon added. 

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