Small rural emergency services still manage acutely unwell patients: A cross‐sectional study

Abstract

The five small rural emergency facilities encountered most of the clinical problems seen in full EDs. They saw almost all categories of emergency presentation, saw almost all diagnostic categories, treated critically ill and injured patients, and performed most procedures.

Small rural emergency services can electronically collect accurate episode-level data: A cross-sectional study

“…3 The VEMD dataset for audit consisted of 17 627 presentations from five facilities, and a random sample of 8.5% (1504/17 627) were audited. Table 1 presents point estimates for rates of data completeness, accuracy and total accuracy for each field audited.…”

“…2 Consequently, there is a lack of data about what happens in Australian SRES. 3 Although each emergency service is small, there are 406 in Australia and when combined they manage approximately 16% (1.3 million) of our annual emergency presentations. 2 We argue that collecting episode-level data in SRES would be beneficial because their data could be applied to: health statistics, hospital management, clinical and epidemiological research, informing policy and funding.…”

Learning on the fly: How rural junior doctors learn during consultations with retrieval physicians

“…They see 1.3 million emergency cases each year, which is 16% of all Australian emergency presentations . These include critically unwell patients who require stabilisation and transport to large urban hospitals . At some hospitals these patients are managed by well‐prepared rural generalists with post‐graduate emergency training .…”

“…1 These include critically unwell patients who require stabilisation and transport to large urban hospitals. 2 At some hospitals these patients are managed by wellprepared rural generalists with postgraduate emergency training. 3 At other small rural hospitals, the only onsite doctor is a junior locally or internationally trained medical graduate (IMG) with little experience in critical care.…”

Providing a lifeline for rural doctors

“…They see 16% of Australia's emergency patient presentations, or almost 1.3 million presentations each year 1 . Although small rural facilities are tasked with managing mainly minor injury and illness, they also treat patients with complex and time critical problems 2 . These facilities are staffed by nurses alone, or by junior doctors, general practitioners or rural generalists.…”