BACKGROUND Very few studies have reported cancer outcomes of patients referred through different routes, despite the prominence of current UK cancer urgent referral guidance. AIM This study aimed to compare outcomes of cancer patients referred through the urgent referral guidance with those who were not, with respect to stage at diagnosis, survival, and delays in diagnosis. DESIGN OF STUDY ...

BACKGROUND Intermittent treatment of acute lower acuity situations has come to be defined as urgent rather than emergent care. The location of urgent care delivery has been shifting from exclusively hospital or office settings to other community locales. AIMS To review the concept of urgent care and the new models of health care delivery in the niche between hospitals and primary care. To hig...

Providing comprehensive care for patients with cancer is complex with regard to severe treatment-related side effects. Hundreds of thousands of patients with cancer visit the emergency department (ED) each year, and more than half report multiple visits. In the United States, few of the National Cancer Institute-designated cancer centers have an ED specifically for patients with cancer. EDs oft...

BACKGROUND Although high-quality care transitions require timely and accurate communication of clinical information between providers, such communication is inconsistent, and there are few established guidelines outside the hospital setting. METHODS Using a systematic, collaborative quality improvement process, Healthcentric Advisors (Providence, Rhode Island) undertook a multistage approach ...

The purpose of this article is to assess the diagnostic accuracy of C-reactive protein (CRP) and white blood cell (WBC) count to discriminate between urgent and nonurgent conditions in patients with acute abdominal pain at the emergency department, thereby guiding the selection of patients for immediate diagnostic imaging.Data from 3 large published prospective cohort studies of patients with a...

BACKGROUND The prevention of serious physical complications in anorexia nervosa (AN) patients is important. The purpose of this study is to clarify which physical and social factors are related to the necessity for urgent hospitalization of anorexia nervosa (AN) patients in a long-term starvation state. We hypothesized that the change of longitudinal BMI, body composition and social background ...

Although slowness of movement is a typical feature of Parkinson's disease (PD), it has been suggested that severely disabled patients remained able to produce normal motor responses in the context of urgent or externally driven situations. To investigate this phenomenon (often designated "paradoxical kinesis"), we required PD patients and healthy subjects to press a large switch under three mai...