A study found that patients seeking medical attention with their acute diseases or problems often go to emergency room departments (ER).
The U.S. current trend shows that more and more patients are going straight to the emergency department services rather than visiting first their personal doctors. According to the study that monitors the visitations of patients seeking acute care, there are only about 45% of acute care visits made to the clinics of personal doctors. Most of the visitation goes straight to the attention of specialists, outpatient departments and emergency departments.
Traditionally, a patient should first make contact with his personal doctor, which is a general practitioner. General practitioners should be the first one to manage the acute symptoms of the disease. However, in tighter schedule, doctors often refer their patients with complex and undifferentiated problems to a known specialist or to a neighbor emergency department.
Dr. Stephen R. Pitts, an associate professor of medicine and a staff physician in Atlanta, Georgia, and a group of researchers study the American population between the years 2001 to 2004. According to their data, there are about 1.09 billion outpatient visitations made by patients yearly. Moreover, about 354 million of the visits are acute care consultations. These include conditions such as new health problems, subsequent episode of a previous disease, or worsening of a chronic condition.
Among the acute care patient visits, general practitioners handled only 22% of them. About 10% of the patients consult a general internist and about 13% of the patients go to a pediatrician. Overall, only 45% of acute care visitations go to a personal physician’s attention, a research says.
The rest of acute care visits, which account for 55% of the patients, go straight to straight to ER departments, specialists, and outpatient departments. About a quarter of the patients, seek the services in an ER department. About 20% goes to the attention of a specialist.
Post a Comment