BMC emergency medicine
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BMC emergency medicine · May 2017
Emergency department use and barriers to wellness: a survey of emergency department frequent users.
There is no common understanding of how needs of emergency department (ED) frequent users differ from other patients. This study sought to examine how to best serve this population. Examinations of why ED frequent users present to the ED, what barriers to care exist, and what service offerings may help these patients achieve an optimal level of health were conducted. ⋯ This study characterized ED frequent users and identified several opportunities to better serve this population. By understanding barriers to care from the patient perspective, health systems can potentially address unmet needs that prevent wellness in this population.
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BMC emergency medicine · May 2017
Developing quality indicators for the care of patients with musculoskeletal injuries in the Emergency Department: study protocol.
Musculoskeletal injuries are a common presentation to the Emergency Department (ED). The quality of care provided is important to the patients, clinicians, organisations and purchasers of care. In the context of the increasing burden of musculoskeletal disease, quality of care needs to occur despite financial impacts, variations in care, and pressure to reach time-based performance measures. This study aims to develop a suite of evidence-based quality indicators (QI) which will provide a measure of the quality of care for patients with musculoskeletal injuries in the ED. ⋯ The assessment of performance against QIs provides a quantitative measure for the quality of care provided to patients, to identify and target quality improvement activities. The QIs developed through this study will be evidence-based and balanced across the areas of structures, processes and outcomes. The rigorous methodology used to develop and test the QIs will result in QIs that are meaningful, valid, feasible to collect and efficiently measurable, amenable to improvement, and selected by experts in the emergency medicine field. The final QI suite will have applications across EDs that affords comparison, benchmarking and optimisation of emergency care for patients.