The Effect of Complaint-based Patient Education on Inappropriate Use of the Emergency Department: Experiences of an Academic Centre in Turkey and Literature Review

Abstract

Inappropriate use of the emergency department (ED) is a major problem worldwide. The lack of health care knowledge of the patients is an important factor in this respect. As a method to increase the health care information of patients who presented to the ED of an urban tertiary care hospital for non-urgent reasons, a training programme was implemented throughout 2017. For this purpose, the most frequent complaints of inappropriate use of ED were identified and educational leaflets were prepared regarding them. Through these leaflets, it was aimed to inform the patients about what they could do on their own for their mild complaints and in which situations they should seek treatment from ED, primary health care units, or outpatient clinics. In order to measure the effectiveness of this complaint-based patient education, as pre- and post-training, the inappropriate usage rates of ED for 2016 and 2018 were compared. Between 1 January 2017 and 31 December 2017, the rate of inappropriate use of ED was 43.9% (79,612 out of 181,216). Patients were informed about the urgency of their complaints through educational leaflets prepared. After the complaint-based patient education conducted throughout 2017, a significant decrease was observed in the rate of inappropriate use of the ED in post-training period in 2018 compared to before training in 2016 (OR 1.49; p < .001, 95% CI [1.47 1.51]). As a result, it can be said that structured and focused information programmes should be implemented for the patients presenting to the ED with non-urgent complaints. An effective complaint-based patient education can reduce the inappropriate use of ED.