Emergency medicine Australasia : EMA
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Emerg Med Australas
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Emerg Med Australas · Apr 2015
Low acuity and general practice-type presentations to emergency departments: A rural perspective.
To estimate the number of general practice (GP)-type patients attending a rural ED and provide a comparative rural estimate to a metropolitan study. ⋯ The proportion of GP-type presentations identified using the four methods ranged from 15% to 69%. The results suggest that triage status and self-referral are not reliable indicators of low acuity in this rural area. In rural areas with a shortage of GPs, it is likely that many people appropriately self-refer to ED because they cannot access a GP. The results indicate that the ACEM method might be most useful for identifying GP-type patients in rural ED. However, this requires validation in other regions of Australia.