Emergency medicine journal : EMJ
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To identify patient and attendance characteristics that are associated with onwards referral to co-located emergency departments (EDs) or other hospital specialty departments from general practitioner (GP) led urgent care centres (UCCs) in northwest London, England. ⋯ The majority of patients, across each category of all explanatory variables, were managed solely within the UCCs, although a large absolute number of patients were referred onwards each year. Several characteristics of patients and their attendances were associated with the outcome variable.
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Observational Study
Interpersonal violence: quantifying the burden of injury in a South African trauma centre.
Interpersonal violence is an epidemic in South Africa and remains an under-reported and expensive burden on health resources. In most of the developing world there is little or no descriptive information about the expense of treating the consequences of interpersonal violence. ⋯ Interpersonal violence is the source of a significant financial burden on the South African health system. Patients are often severely injured and require a high level of specialist investigations and surgical care. This study gives evidence to improve budget and workload planning for regional surgical departments and supports the need for more effective primary prevention.