General Direction Department, University Hospitals K.U. Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
Int J Health Plann Manage. 2012 Apr-Jun;27(2):e104-20. doi: 10.1002/hpm.1098.
This paper aims to present a review of published evidence of barriers to emergency care, with attention towards both financial and other barriers.
With the keywords (financial) accessibility, barriers and emergency care services, citations in PubMed were searched and further selected in the context of the objective of this article.
Forty articles, published over a period of 15 years, showed evidence of significant barriers to emergency care. These barriers often tend to persist, despite the fact that the evidence was published many years ago. Several publications stressed the importance of the financial barriers in foregoing or delaying potentially life-saving emergency services, both in poor and rich countries. Other publications report non-financial barriers that prevent patients in need of emergency care (pre-hospital and in-patient care) from seeking care, from arriving in the proper emergency department without undue delay or from receiving proper treatment when they do arrive in these departments.
It is clear that timely access to life-saving and disability-preventing emergency care is problematic in many settings. Yet, low-cost measures can likely be taken to significantly reduce these barriers. It is time to make an inventory of these measures and to implement the most cost-effective ones worldwide.
本文旨在综述已发表的有关急诊障碍的证据，重点关注财务障碍和其他障碍。
使用关键词（财务）可及性、障碍和急诊服务，在 PubMed 中进行了检索，并根据本文的目的进行了进一步选择。
在过去 15 年的时间里，有 40 篇文章发表了有关急诊障碍的重要证据。尽管这些证据是多年前发表的，但这些障碍往往仍然存在。一些出版物强调了在贫穷和富裕国家中，财务障碍对放弃或延迟潜在的救命急诊服务的重要性。其他出版物则报告了非财务障碍，这些障碍阻止了需要急诊护理的患者（院前和住院护理）寻求护理，阻止了他们在适当的急诊部门及时到达，或者阻止了他们在到达这些部门后得到适当的治疗。
显然，在许多情况下，及时获得救命和预防残疾的急诊护理存在问题。然而，可能可以采取低成本措施来显著减少这些障碍。现在是时候对这些措施进行盘点，并在全球范围内实施最具成本效益的措施了。
