Idaho was recently ranked 50th in the first national appraisal of emergency room care by the American College of Emergency Physicians.

The report ranked and graded the 50 states and the District of Columbia, marking only Arkansas lower than Idaho, and giving both states ‘D’s.

Each state was appraised by ACEP over the last year for adequacy in five categories. The categories were public health and safety, medical liability, quality or patient safety, access and overall performance.

“What we see is overcrowded emergency room departments where patients wait hours — if not days sometimes — for inpatient beds,” said Dr. Frederick Blum, national president of ACEP.

So why did Idaho do so poorly? Doctors interviewed on KPVI news, based in Pocatello, attempted to answer this question.

The doctors mentioned several faults in the Idaho emergency care system. A lack of doctors per capita and a lack of specialty doctors in the state were both pointed out. Another factor mentioned was more than 250,000, or one out of every five Idaho residents are uninsured.

According to the ACEP report, Idaho needs to improve in every one of the five categories tracked by the report card.

“The state needs to increase its annual per capita expenditure on hospital care and annual state Medicaid expenditures. Increased spending could attract more emergency physicians and registered nurses. Building new trauma centers also could provide more advanced rapid response emergency services for residents,” according to the report.

Many of the problems were accredited to Idaho’s widely-dispersed population.

“These are all areas that we struggle with,” said Dr. Curtis Sandy, an Idaho ACEP member, in the KPVI interview. “Especially in a rural and frontier state like Idaho.”

Ultimately no one in the nation fared particularly well in the report. None of the states received an ‘A’ and more than 80 percent of the states received a grade between a ‘C+’ and a ‘D.’

The report had some good things to say about the state’s emergency care system. For instance, Idaho was ranked 20th for its number of emergency departments per one million people, and it ranked 16th in alcohol-related fatalities per other traffic-related fatalities.

Several projects have been set up to improve Idaho’s emergency care, including a new trauma center in Pocatello, which ACEP officials considered a great stride for the state.