Doctors’ visit dilemma: exploring the reliability of the data in an outpatient department
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Tarih
2021
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info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Özet
The aim of the study is to investigate the nature of outpatient-based visits to speciality care physicians in outpatient departments of a teaching hospital. A questionnaire which was in a sense “an after-visit summary” that contained patient age, gender and doctor’s major office contact reason was developed. Physicians from different medical disciplines completed the questionnaire on randomly selected visits. Data was analysed statistically by descriptive analysis and cross tabulation. 1184 adult patients were analysed; 587 [49.6 (%)] of them were visited by medicine specialists, and 597 [50.4 (%)] by surgeons. Among all adult admissions, first patients comprised less than half of the workload, 40.8 (%) in surgery and 43.5 (%) in medicine. There was a significant difference between the number of patient contacts in medical and surgical specialities in terms of major visit categories. Compared to first visit, numbers of established patients, office consultation and reporting were significantly higher, whereas number of prehospitalizations was significantly lower in medicine than surgery. As shown in the study, per capita doctors’ visit data is not very reliable, nor is it uniform in OECD database, disabling the comparison between countries.
