Characteristics of Patients Who Leave Emergency Departments without Being Seen
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Patients leaving the emergency department (ED) without being seen (LWBS) by a physician have become a growing concern in overcrowded EDs. The purpose of this study was to determine the acuity level, reasons, and outcomes of LWBS cases. METHODS: LWBS patients (or their guardians) from two linked Canadian EDs (one adult, one pediatric), identified during 11 sampling periods of seven days' duration each, were contacted by telephone. Descriptive statistics are provided. RESULTS: A total of 711 (4.5%) of 15,660 registered emergency patients left without being seen (50% male; median age, 33 years). Triage-matched controls waited a median of 87 minutes before seeing a physician. Of the 711 LWBS cases, 512 (72%) were contacted and 498 agreed to participate. The most common major reason for leaving was "fed up with waiting" (44.8%). Overall, 60% of LWBS cases sought medical attention within one week; 14 patients were hospitalized, and one required urgent surgery. Triage level was not associated with the probability of subsequently seeking medical attention (61%, 61%, and 60% in triage levels 3, 4, and 5, respectively). Of the 198 (39%) who did not subsequently seek medical attention, 50 patients (26%) had been triaged as urgent and one patient died six days after ED registration. CONCLUSIONS: The most common reason for LWBS is impatience during peak ED periods. Many of these patients seek medical care within one week. Complications occurred rarely; however, "high-risk" patients who leave without being seen do experience adverse health outcomes. Further research is required to examine ways to reduce LWBS cases.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it