General practice cooperatives: long waiting times for home visits due to long distances?
Publication year
2007Source
BMC Health Services Research, 7, 1, (2007), pp. 19-1-19ISSN
Publication type
Article / Letter to editor
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Organization
IQ Healthcare
General Practice
Former Organization
Centre for Quality of Care Research
Journal title
BMC Health Services Research
Volume
vol. 7
Issue
iss. 1
Page start
p. 19-1
Page end
p. 19
Subject
EBP 3: Effective Primary Care and Public Health; EBP 4: Quality of Care; NCEBP 3: Implementation Science; NCEBP 4: Quality of hospital and integrated care; NCEBP 7: Effective primary care and public healthAbstract
BACKGROUND: The introduction of large-scale out-of-hours GP cooperatives has led to questions about increased distances between the GP cooperatives and the homes of patients and the increasing waiting times for home visits in urgent cases. We studied the relationship between the patient's waiting time for a home visit and the distance to the GP cooperative. Further, we investigated if other factors (traffic intensity, home visit intensity, time of day, and degree of urgency) influenced waiting times. METHODS: Cross-sectional study at four GP cooperatives. We used variance analysis to calculate waiting times for various categories of traffic intensity, home visit intensity, time of day, and degree of urgency. We used multiple logistic regression analysis to calculate to what degree these factors affected the ability to meet targets in urgent cases. RESULTS: The average waiting time for 5827 consultations was 30.5 min. Traffic intensity, home visit intensity, time of day and urgency of the complaint all seemed to affect waiting times significantly. A total of 88.7% of all patients were seen within 1 hour. In the case of life-threatening complaints (U1), 68.8% of the patients were seen within 15 min, and 95.6% of those with acute complaints (U2) were seen within 1 hour. For patients with life-threatening complaints (U1) the percentage of visits that met the time target of 15 minutes decreased from 86.5% (less than 2.5 km) to 16.7% (equals or more than 20 km). DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: Although home visits waiting times increase with increasing distance from the GP cooperative, it appears that traffic intensity, home visit intensity, and urgency also influence waiting times. For patients with life-threatening complaints waiting times increase sharply with the distance.
This item appears in the following Collection(s)
- Academic publications [246515]
- Electronic publications [134102]
- Faculty of Medical Sciences [93308]
- Open Access publications [107633]
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