To determine why patients reattend an A&E department we surveyed 235 patients who returned unscheduled in a one-month period. Sixty-two per cent returned because of persistent symptoms. Sixty-three per cent presented within a week of their initial visit. Only 32% had attempted to see their GP. Thirty-five per cent of all patients claimed that A&E staff had advised them to return if they had pro...

BACKGROUND Rate of Unscheduled Return Visits (URVs) to the Emergency Department has been considered as a key indicator for evaluating the quality of the Emergency Department care for decades. A higher rate of URVs can have a negative impact on the quality of health care. Investigations of the reasons for these returns have indicated that many of these visits can be preventable. OBJECTIVES Giv...

The Department of Defense launched a mandatory anthrax immunization program for military personnel in December 1997. This program has been criticized for many reasons, including concern over side effects. This study was designed to give a quick answer to the question of whether vaccinated persons who deployed to southwest Asia were more likely to seek medical care upon their return than their u...

KEY FINDINGS Data from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, 2012 •Physician office visit rates for well care were lower for school-aged (those aged 6-11 years) children (31 per 100 population) and adolescents aged 12-17 years (29 per 100 population) than for younger children (349 and 74 per 100 population for children under age 1 year and 1-5 years, respectively). •Visit rates for well ...

STUDY OBJECTIVES Differences between returning and non-returning minor head injury (MHI) emergency department (ED) patients, between the characteristics of the first visit and revisit, and between admitted and nonadmitted returning patients were investigated. METHODS This was a retrospective study. All discharged ED patients with ICD-9 codes 850.0 to 850.9, 920, and 959.01 in 2013 were enroll...

OBJECTIVES To apply the Six Sigma tools of Change Acceleration Process and Work-Out and to improve patient access in an outpatient clinic in a hospital-based residency training program. STUDY DESIGN Observational study. METHODS Comparison of productivity in an obstetrics and gynecology clinic after implementation of the Six Sigma principles, with a comparable internal medicine clinic as a c...

The aim of this study is to estimate the proportion of and predictors for early return visits (ERVs) to the emergency department (ED) in Taiwan.This is a population-based study using data of 1 million people randomly selected from all beneficiaries of the Taiwan National Health Insurance. All ED visits in 2012 were analyzed. The ERVs to the ED were defined as those ED revisits within 3 days aft...

Unscheduled re-attendances of patients to the A&E Department were examined over 50 days. A re-attendance rate of 1.9 per 100 new patients was found. Of 102 return visits, only 35 resulted in no change in the diagnosis or treatment. Common faults in the initial consultation were failure to explain the condition and prognosis adequately and failure to provide adequate analgesia. Review of patient...

OBJECTIVE We sought to determine and compare rates of pediatric mental health presentations and associated costs in emergency departments (EDs) in Alberta. METHODS We examined 16 154 presentations by 12 589 patients (patient age < or = 17 yr) between April 2002 and March 2006 using the Ambulatory Care Classification System, a province-wide database for Alberta. The following variables of inte...