Articles: emergency-services.
-
Pediatric emergency care · Apr 1993
Comparative StudyReferral, admission, and discharge patterns in a pediatric emergency department in Israel.
The pediatric emergency department (PED) is an important component of the medical services provided by a hospital. The purpose of the study was to describe the patterns of referrals, admissions, and discharges in a PED to determine to what extent the PED is used solely as an emergency unit, as opposed to being used as a part of a set of primary care facilities. Data were recorded from 1200 patient charts, out of 19,000 visits to a PED in Israel in 1988. ⋯ The rate of admissions was low (11%). This study shows that a large part of the PED work is actually primary care. Some of the demographic, cultural, and ethnic reasons for these patterns are reviewed.
-
Hosp Community Psychiatry · Apr 1993
Frequent psychiatric visitors to a Veterans Affairs medical center emergency care unit.
The study examined characteristics of patients who made repeat visits to the psychiatric emergency service of a Veterans Affairs medical center. ⋯ One-third of patients seen during a one-year period revisited the emergency service, a rate substantially higher than those reported for large urban non-VA hospitals. The higher rate may have been due to the longer sampling period, to a more seriously ill population, or to fewer community resources for veterans because of misperceptions about their eligibility.
-
Clin Perform Qual Health Care · Apr 1993
Hospital-based continuous quality improvement: a realistic appraisal.
To evaluate the impact of a continuous quality improvement (CQI) multidisciplinary team process on emergency department admission times. ⋯ Although CQI is a promising approach to certain quality problems, a number of issues remain to be explored before full-scale implementation in academic centers can be endorsed.