Evaluation of Patients Admissing Emergency Care Services from the Point of View of Family Medicine

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Inappropriate use of Emergency Department (ED) for non-urgent complaints compromises the functioning of ED and has been increasing day by day. In this study we examined the annual data of the patients who admitted to the Emergency Department in order to determine the ratio of appropriate usage according to the definitive diagnoses of the patients and to help forward new policies regarding this issue. METHODS: Files of patients, who admitted to our ED between January 1 and to December 31 2017, were examined. Data were evaluated by SPSS software version 22 and the analyses were performed by using Chi-square test. A value of p <0.05 was accepted to be statistically significant. RESULTS: We found that 72.20% (n: 42785\59282) of the people who admitted to the ED during one year had admitted for complaints that should be addressed in the primary healthcare centers or specialist policlinics and only 19.2% (n: 11359\59282) of the ED visits were appropriate. We also found that the most frequent reasons for ED visits were respiratory system symptoms and pain. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: We found that the vast majority of the patients who admitted to the emergency department were not actually urgent. We suggest that measures such as effectuation of the referral system for effective use of the family medicine system, use of triage in emergency departments, and extra fees for using the emergency department inappropriately can be implemented to reduce the workload in emergency services.

Keywords

• emergency department
• primary care
• gate keeping