Oliver Frank wrote:
> are probably intended by their funders to provide mainly secondary care, > do also provide primary care by allowing anybody to walk in to their > emergency departments and be seen for problems that could have been > treated often better and usually much more cheaply in primary care > settings such as general practice. No, The funders (especially the Feds) insist, by legislation, that any H. sapiens who presents at an ED must be seen by a doctor, no matter how trivial Triage nurses can triage, but cannot send a patient away, ever. The hospitals would love to change this rule. Generally the numbers of ED presentations who really could be managed in [urban] GP is barely 10% Usually these people never get into a cubicle and are seen quickly by the intern/junior resident, so cheaper is very debatable (viz. the hourly rate of an intern in Vic is $21, less than a cat B consult) they are not a big issue in EDs, in particular are not a source of overcrowding. Most present after-hours when (in fairness to the patient) GPs are not available. However, the primary care so provided is dis-continuous and generally crap: that's the big issue IMHO. Ian _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
