Evaluation of non-urgent visits to a busy urban emergency department.

OBJECTIVE To identify the proportion of patients who were taken into the emergency room on the basis of legal regulations and non-urgent medical procedures. METHODS This prospective study was conducted in the Emergency Department, Toros State Hospital, Mersin, Turkey. Data were collected over 4 weeks (January 2011) and then analyzed using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Analysis of Variance, and Kruskal-Wallis H tests. RESULTS During the study period, 21,014 patients visited the Emergency Department. The applications were measured during a 3-shift schedule (08-16, 16-00, 00-08 hours). The total number of ordinary emergency admissions was 16,370. Of the total, 4,644 (22.1%) of the visits were evaluated as inappropriate. According to our study, inappropriate use of the emergency department was 51.1% more frequent during the 08-16 hours shift than the others. CONCLUSION Inappropriate use of EDs with non-urgent applications makes it difficult to guarantee access for real emergency cases, decreases the readiness for care, and produces negative spillover effects on the quality of emergency services.