Emergency medicine Australasia : EMA
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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.
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Emerg Med Australas · Feb 2015
Age and admission times as predictive factors for failure of admissions to discharge-stream short-stay units.
Discharge-stream emergency short-stay units (ESSU) improve ED and hospital efficiency. Age of patients and time of hospital presentations have been shown to correlate with increasing complexity of care. We aim to determine whether an age and time cut-off could be derived to subsequently improve short-stay unit success rates. ⋯ Patients >70 years of age have higher rates of failure after admission to discharge-stream ESSU. Although in appropriately selected discharge-stream patients, no age group or time-band of presentation was associated with increased failure rate beyond the stipulated KPI.
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Emerg Med Australas · Feb 2015
Impact of formal teaching on medical documentation by interns in an emergency department in a Queensland teaching hospital.
This study's objective was to determine whether tuition in medical documentation enhanced the ability of emergency medicine interns to produce effective medical records. ⋯ The study demonstrated that documentation of clinical notes by interns can be enhanced by formal tuition.