Use and misuse of accident and emergency services at queen alia military hospital

Abstract EN

Objective: To determine the characteristics of attendees and to assess the misuse of the Accident and Emergency department at Queen Alia Military Hospital.

Methods: The records of 29463 attendees to the Accident and Emergency Department at a general military hospital during the period January -June 2002 were retrospectively reviewed.

For each attendee the following information was recorded: age, sex, day of the week, hour of attendance, required emergency service, class of urgency and disposition.

Patients were classified according to their presenting problems to life-threatening, very urgent, urgent and trivial conditions.

They were classified according to age into three groups: Below 30 years, 30-60 years and above 60 years.

Data were retrieved and analyzed.

Results: From the total of 29463 attendees, 15207 (51.6%) were males and 14256 (48.4%) were females.

The month of May generated visits more than any other month.

Saturday and Thursday were the busiest days of the week.

The majority of the patients (88.7%) were classified as trivial conditions.

A large percentage (47%) was of the age group 14-30 years, but elderly (above 60 years) represented a considerable number (32%).

Most of the patients visited Accident and Emergency Department in the second and first shifts (39% and 37%) respectively.

Fifteen hundred and thirteen patients were admitted, of them 832 (55%) were males and the rest (45%) were females.

The admission rate was 5.1%.

About half the patients (51%) sought medical emergency services and (49%) were seeking surgical emergency services.

Conclusion: The increasing number of attendees, especially elderly patients, has its implications on future planning of Accident and Emergency Department.

We observed that the Accident and Emergency Department is largely misused, thus, non-urgent visits adversely affect the quality of provided emergency care and patients’ satisfaction.