A Realistic Analysis Of Patients' Decision-Making Regarding "Clinically Unnecessary" Use Of Emergency And Urgent Care

Abstract

When patients do not require the levels of clinical care or urgency that the service they contact provides, the demand is referred to as "clinically unnecessary."
Goal: to determine program theories that aim to explain why patients seek urgent and emergency care, which is later determined to be clinically unnecessary.
Methods: Four recent systematic reviews of the demand for urgent and emergency care, as well as a search that was updated as of January 2017. Context-Mechanism-Outcome chains from 32 qualitative studies were used to develop program theories, which were then tested by examining how they related to 29 quantitative studies and current theories of health behavior.
Conclusions: Interventions could involve societal changes to improve coping skills and modifications to the accessibility and structure of health services, rather than merely concentrating on the behavior of individuals.