Emergency department operations: Time to initial physician in a demographically partitioned emergency department

ABSTRACT

Background: In the Middle East, cultural and other factors combine to dictate emergency department partitioning by demographics. The aim of this study was to assess patient time performance, from arrival in the emergency department to initial evaluation by physician (tMD), in various areas of the partitioned by demographics.

Methods: This study was a retrospective database analysis of 176,996 patients over a period of six months. Univariate and multivariate analysis was conducted between the met tMD target (dependent variable) and the three triage study areas (independent variable). The data were then incorporated into the statistical software package Stata (version 14MP, StataCorp, College Station, TX, USA).

Results: During the study period, total census was 208,377. There were 176,996 CTAS 3–5 patients eligible to be included in this study. The median age of the study population was 31.6 years (25.0–41.0) and 124,707(70.5%) were male. The overall tMD varied significantly between males vs. females (91 min vs. 79 min, P = .0001), adults vs. pediatrics (85 min vs. 52 min, P = .0001), and Gulf Cooperation Council vs. non-Gulf Cooperation Council patients (42 min vs. 115 min, P = .0001).

Conclusion: The time to initial evaluation by physician was found to vary in different parts of the emergency department and appeared unrelated to patient acuity or emergency department operational stressors.

KEYWORDS:

• Time to initial physician
• emergency department
• demographic partitioning
• time performance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.