Contrary to popular belief, there are few people going to the emergency room for the wrong reasons. They would be 6%, according to a new French study.
Overcrowding in emergencies and the lack of resources to accommodate patients are among the reasons why a number of services have been on strike for several months. For many, the emergency rooms are saturated in part because of people traveling for the wrong reasons: a simple cold or a consultation that a general practitioner could simply carry out. However, a French study published in the journal British Medical Journal Quality & Safety contradicts this idea.
Poor health coverage to blame
Indeed, only 6% of visits to the emergency room would be inappropriate, according to this work carried out by emergency doctors with 30,000 patients. However, previous studies estimated this figure at 30%. This difference is explained by the fact that the researchers of the present study have refined their criteria. For example, the authors of the study sought to find out whether the acts performed on patients in the emergency room could have been performed by a general practitioner. In addition, they analyzed the profiles of these patients whose passage to the emergency room is inappropriate. It turns out that these people often have very poor health coverage. They also explain that they have difficulty making an appointment with a general practitioner.
Go to the emergency room, for lack of an appointment with the general practitioner
This study echoes a survey published by the Defender of Rights at the end of October. This report reveals that certain medical practices (dentists, gynecologists and psychiatrists) discriminate against the poorest patients, ie those who benefit from CMU-C or ACS. These people are refused appointments and therefore refuse treatment or decide to go to the emergency room, for lack of anything better. In addition, the problem of emergency room overcrowding would come from the quality of the service itself: “it is much more a question of downstream. (…) It is rather on a mismatch between demand and our difficulty in having hospital beds for patients”, concludes Diane Naouri, former head of the emergency clinic at Saint-Antoine hospital in Paris, and author main of the study.
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