Croatian medical journal
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Croatian medical journal · Aug 2019
The influence of general practitioners on access points to health care in a system without gatekeeping: a cross-sectional study in the context of the QUALICOPC project in Austria.
To assess the rates of specialist visits and visits to hospital emergency departments (ED) among patients in Austria with and without concurrent general practitioner (GP) consultation and among patients with and without chronic disease. ⋯ Visiting specialists in Austria is quite common, and the simple presence of a GP as a usual source of care is insufficient to regulate pathways within the health care system. This can be particularly difficult for chronic care patients who often require care at different levels of the system and show higher frequency of ED presentations.