Factors associated with non-urgent visits to the emergency department in a tertiary care centre, western Saudi Arabia: cross-sectional study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: To explore magnitude and factors associated with non-urgent visits to the emergency department (ED) in a tertiary care centre, western Saudi Arabia. DESIGN: A cross-sectional study. SETTING: ED of a tertiary care hospital in western Saudi Arabia. PARTICIPANTS: 400 patients, both men and women. INTERVENTIONS: An interview-based questionnaire was administered to a consecutive sample of patients who visited the ED during morning shifts, where primary healthcare centres (PHCs) and outpatient clinics were available. PRIMARY OUTCOME MEASURE: ED visits classified as non-urgent versus urgent (excluding life-threatening conditions) based on the Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale (CTAS). Levels IV and V were classified as non-urgent. RESULTS: Majority of the cases were adult (97.3%) and half of them were women (54.8%). Non-urgent visits represented 78.5% among non-life-threatening cases. One-third of the patients (33.8%) had three visits or more to the ED during the past year. Main reasons for visiting the ED were perception that the condition was urgent (42.0%), easy access (25.5%) and limited resources and services at the PHCs (17.8%). Patients 40-50 years old were more likely to have non-urgent visits (OR=3.21, 95% CI 1.15 to 8.98). However, likelihood of non-urgent visits was significantly lower among patients with cancer (OR=0.37, 95% CI 0.19 to 0.72) and cardiovascular disease (OR=0.43, 95% CI 0.23 to 0.83), and those who live near the hospital (OR=0.49, 95% CI 0.28 to 0.88). CONCLUSIONS: The current study reported overuse of the ED. Enhancement of the primary care services, in concordance with community awareness, is an important component to reduce burden due to non-urgent use of the ED.
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".