Emergency Departments (ED) are highly dynamic environments comprising complex multi-dimensional patient-care processes. In recent decades, there has been increased pressure to improve ED services, while taking into account various aspects such as clinical quality, operational efficiency, and cost performance. Overcrowding has become a major barrier to receiving a proper and timely emergency care in many acute hospitals throughout the world. Patients often face long waiting times to be seen and treated. Those who require admission may even wait longer. The scope of this research is to focus on ED factors that lead to overcrowding and their management. Technology is being cited as one of the management tools, specifically the utilization of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) for tracking patients as their journey progresses through an ED. Like any technology, RFID has potential and pitfalls. The author chose to use Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) as a tool to explore the possible failures of RFID technology as it is utilized in one of the ED in Riyadh Military Hospital (RMH). This particular ED has been used as a case study to explore those failures and, with the use of FMEA, propose a set of recommendations to address those failures and improve the design and implementation of RFID. The experience of RMH-ED was explored through interviews and a survey in which 100 participants took part. The survey touched upon various aspects of this experience. This was due to the various roles of the surveyed staff who were involved with this technology. These roles ranged from front line clinical staff to administrative staff, management staff and technical support staff. Data analysis showed convincing evidence of the positive impact RFID had on managing ED overcrowding. However, and as expected, there are some pitfalls and failures that FMEA helped identifying and suggested potential solutions to them. RFID is a small link in the chain of other technological innovations and solutions. It is by no means capable of solving the problems associated with ED overcrowding by itself. Most of the search carried out by the author identified large variation in approaches to dealing with the issue of ED overcrowding. Those ranged from applying more human resources to altering the pathways of managing patients journey through healthcare system to applying more intermediate layers of management to ease the pressure of the Emergency departments. Other approaches included some aspects of technology such as development of early warning systems that have not been widely adopted and remained as isolated efforts.

Made available in DSpace on 2011-05-04T12:42:04Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2010 / O estudo teve como objetivo investigar a superlotação nos serviços de emergência hospitalar (SEH). Para tal, foram elaborados dois artigos, já publicados. O primeiro, elaborado durante a crise dos serviços de emergência hospitalar de 2005, discutiu as características estruturantes do Programa QUALISUS do Ministério da Saúde do Brasil, em curso de implantação, analisou as especificidades desses serviços e fez algumas considerações sobre o sistema de saúde do município do Rio de Janeiro, sede do início do programa QUALISUS. Com a complexidade do cenário onde o programa era implementado, exemplificado pela grave crise na assistência àqueles que demandavam cuidados nos serviços de emergência, assim como as características da matriz da qualidade sugerida pelo programa, cuja ênfase é na reorganização da rede dos serviços de emergência e na recepção dos serviços de emergência hospitalar, voltados para o acolhimento e a classificação de risco, optou-se pelo aprofundamento do estudo sobre os SEH. A partir de uma revisão sistemática, discutiu-se as intervenções voltadas para solucionar o problema da superlotação dos Serviços de Emergência Hospitalar, e identificou-se evidências de baixo desempenho organizacional. A revisão sistemática partiu de um universo de 2.992 títulos, onde foram selecionados 822 títulos para análise de resumos e textos integrais, entre o período de 2000 a junho de 2007. A superlotação foi caracterizada como um fenômeno mundial, com causas e conseqüências. As intervenções que interferiram positivamente no principal indicador da superlotação, o tempo de permanência no SEH, apontaram para a melhoria do fluxo de saída dos pacientes dos serviços de emergência hospitalar, através do aumento do desempenho organizacional. Os resultados dessa revisão desmistificaram as soluções que aumentam as barreiras de acesso ou melhoram a estrutura dos SEH. Os dois artigos se complementam, na medida em que, a análise do contexto da implantação de um programa institucional de qualidade e dos seus conceitos, suscitou a necessidade de investigar mais profundamente as características desses serviços e propor hipóteses para solucionar seus graves problemas. / The study aimed to investigate the overcrowding in the public hospitals emergency rooms (ER). For such, two articles had been elaborated and are already published. The first one is related to the crisis of the public hospitals emergency rooms services which took place in the year of 2005 in Brazil. It presents the major characteristics of the Ministry of Health QUALISUS Program, analyzes the specificities of these services and made some considerations about the city of Rio de Janeiro health system, QUALISUS headquarter. Given the complexity of the broad picture where the program was implemented, leaded by the serious crisis in the emergency rooms medical care, as well as the characteristics of the quality matrix suggested by the program, whose emphasis is the reorganization of the emergency services network and in the reception of the services of hospital emergency driven toward the shelter and the classification of risk, it was decided to deepen the research on the emergency room aspects. From a thorough systematic review based on a universe of 2.992 titles, 882 full articles and abstracts from the period between 2.000 and 2.007 were analyzed. Overcrowding was characterized as a world-wide phenomenon, with causes and consequences. Among the main aspects, this literature raise up a range of interventions to solve the emergency room overcrowding. Low organizational performance is a scientific finding. Interventions that had modified positively the main indicator of overcrowding, the time of permanence in the emergency room, dealt with the improvement of the patients discharge from emergency rooms through the increase of the organizational performance. The results of this systematic revision had demystified the solutions that increase access barriers or improve the structure of the emergency room. The two articles are complementary: the analysis of a quality institutional program concepts and implementation rose up the need to better understand the major characteristics of the emergency room services to identify hypothesis to solve its major problems.