Fewer queues in emergency rooms (Ps) if general practitioners group together ensuring coordinated opening of surgeries for at least 10-12 hours a day: inappropriate visits can be reduced from 7 to 20%. These are the results of the study conducted by Cristina Ugolini of the University of Bologna, presented at Econometrics workshop in Health at the University of Padua. The researchers studied the Emilia-Romagna context for the year 2009. "In this Region - explains Ugolini - a program aimed at general medicine has been underway for some years with the specific intention of extending the opening hours of the associated medical clinics in group. We therefore verified whether this policy is also able to influence the frequency of access to PS services, with particular attention to the conditions of potential inappropriateness". Using some administrative databases, the flows of ERs not followed by hospitalization, the assisted list of patients registered with doctors operating in the associative form of the group and general information on each doctor were analysed. For patients registered with doctors working in groups that extend opening hours beyond 9 hours a day, there are fewer accesses to the emergency room. This applies both to the total number of accesses to the PS and to the white codes alone. Similar results also emerge considering the sum of white codes and green codes characterized only by a general visit, not followed by further diagnostic or specialist investigations. «Our estimates – he notes – tell us that the extension of the opening hours reduces the expected number of visits to the PS from 3% to 13%. The effect is even more marked if we consider the white codes (the expected reduction percentages range from 7% to 21% depending on the estimation methods) and the broader definition of inappropriate access which includes green codes with only general visits (the percentages range from 8% to 19%).
Tuesday, 22 July 2014 – Doctor33
Gianluca Fiorentini, Matteo Lippi Bruni, Irene Mammi, Cristina Ugolini, METHODOLOGICAL ASPECTS FOR AN ESTIMATION OF THE REDUCTION OF IMPROPER ACCESSES TO THE EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT,
