Yes / Emergency Department demand continues to rise in almost all high-income countries, including those with universal coverage and a strong primary care network. Many of these countries have been experimenting with innovative methods to stem demand for acute care, while at the same time providing much needed services that can prevent Emergency Department attendance and later hospital admissions. A large proportion of patients comprise of those with minor illnesses that could potentially be seen by a health care provider in a primary care setting. The increasing number of visits to Emergency Departments not only causes delay in urgent care provision but also increases the overall cost. In the UK, the National Health Service (NHS) has made a number of efforts to strengthen primary healthcare services to increase accessibility to healthcare as well as address patients’ needs by introducing new urgent care services.
In this review, we describe efforts that have been ongoing in the UK and France for over a decade as well as specific programs to target the rising needs of emergency care in both England and France. Like many such programs, there have been successes, failures and unintended consequences. Thus, the urgent care system of other high-income countries can learn from these experiments.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/11011 |
| Date | 03 September 2014 |
| Creators | Mason, S., Mountain, Gail, Turner, J., Arain, M., Revue, E., Weber, E.J. |
| Source Sets | Bradford Scholars |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, Published version |
| Rights | © 2014 Mason et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. |
Page generated in 0.0023 seconds