1689 Reducing Referrals to Secondary Care - An Innovative Approach

Reducing inappropriate referrals to secondary care: our experiences with the ENT Emergency clinic.

INTRODUCTION In the current financial climate faced by the NHS, it is important that we reduce the amount of inappropriate referrals made to secondary care specialties. ENT Emergency Clinics are one-stop clinics provided by many UK ENT departments to allow more rapid access to ENT services from primary care. However, many referrals to these clinics were considered to be inappropriate, overloadi...

Primary care nurses: effects on secondary care referrals for diabetes

BACKGROUND Primary care nurses play an important role in diabetes care, and were introduced in GP-practice partly to shift care from hospital to primary care. The aim of this study was to assess whether the referral rate for hospital treatment for diabetes type II (T2DM) patients has changed with the introduction of primary care nurses, and whether these changes were related to the number of di...

An Approach to Reducing Overfitting in FCM with Evolutionary Optimization

Fuzzy clustering methods are conveniently employed in constructing a fuzzy model of a system, but they need to tune some parameters. In this research, FCM is chosen for fuzzy clustering. Parameters such as the number of clusters and the value of fuzzifier significantly influence the extent of generalization of the fuzzy model. These two parameters require tuning to reduce the overfitting in the...

Interventions to improve outpatient referrals from primary care to secondary care.

BACKGROUND The primary care specialist interface is a key organisational feature of many health care systems. Patients are referred to specialist care when investigation or therapeutic options are exhausted in primary care and more specialised care is needed. Referral has considerable implications for patients, the health care system and health care costs. There is considerable evidence that th...

Reducing inappropriate ENT referrals.