Unveiling Trends: A 5-Year Analysis of Non-emergency Visits to the Emergency Department Amidst Primary Care Challenges in the USA and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Regular unscheduled low-acuity visits to the emergency departments (ED) significantly cause crowding and prolonged wait times, adversely affecting patient outcomes. Aims: This study analyzes trends in non-emergency visits to emergency departments (EDs) in the USA and Canada over five years, focusing on the impact of socio-demographic factors and primary care accessibility. Methodology: A retrospective cross-sectional study; Using datasets from CIHI (Canada) and NCHS (USA), it identifies disparities in ED utilization across age, sex, and race, as well as the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on visit frequencies. Results: There are significant correlations between age and low-acuity visits, with females visiting more frequently in Canada and males in the USA. Pandemic-related changes led to a reduction in low-acuity visits by approximately 3.6% in the USA and 3.8% in Canada. A chi-square test of independence showed a significant relationship between age and triage levels at presentation (c.l= 0.95, p value = 0.05). Conclusion: The study underscores the need for policy interventions to enhance primary care access and reduce ED overcrowding. Further research is recommended to explore systemic factors influencing healthcare-seeking behavior.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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".