[Feasibility study of a call centre to reduce non-scheduled visits and unjustified consultations in pediatric emergencies units].

INTRODUCTION

Non-justified and non-scheduled visits to emergency units are ever increasing and consequently overburden their staff. Because it seems necessary to meet this heavy demand of urgent health care, a possible solution could be to set up phone call centers dedicated to pediatric care. First, when people call the emergency number, the SAMU doctors will field these calls and immediately determine the degree of urgency of the situation before transferring the call to the appropriate standardized call center who will then advise the caller as to how to proceed.

OBJECTIVE

To access the technical feasibility of setting up this call center which will be in place with the already existing emergency call system and also to ascertain if the system will indeed reduce the number of unnecessary emergency medical consultations.

METHODS

The standardized information and advice given by this call center concerning fever, diarrhoea, crying, head trauma, respiratory obstruction in the young infant comes from the consensus of the association of Courlygones pediatric doctors. As a follow up to the initial contact with the caller, nurses call the families back seven days later to find out if the families did finally take their child to the emergency room or not and also to see if the callers retained the necessary advice given through the call center. Finally, the nurses request that the families assess their own satisfaction will this new call service.

RESULTS

Over a period of 97 days, 250 calls were fielded. In 84% of the cases (n=210/250), calls came from parents and most of them (109/198, 55.05%) had only a single child. On average, each call lasted between 5 to 8 minutes. 97% of the callers (n=178/183) were satisfied by the advice given. Following the call, 128 callers /215 (59.53%) asked an additional medical advice within 20 h and 61.71% (n=79/128) of them actually took their child to a scheduled medical consultation. Only 2.34% of the 128 callers were finally hospitalized.

DISCUSSION

Our results confirm the technical feasibility to set up a call centre dedicated to paediatrics and its positive impact on the number of non-scheduled and non-justified visits to emergency units.