A New Crowding Indicator in the Emergency Department

Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research

Status: Not yet enrolling

Conditions: Emergency Department; Crowding

Study type: Observational

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT07111624

CAOS

Details and patient eligibility

About

Fenice has proposed a new indicator to measure the level of crowding in the ER. The aim of this study is to evaluate, in a national multicenter context, the degree of agreement between the Fenice indicator and the perception of crowding of the ER operators and to compare this agreement with that between NEDOCS and the perception of the operators.

Full description

The NEDOCS (National Emergency Department OverCrowding Study) is currently the most widely used indicator in Italy to measure the level of crowding in Emergency Departments (EDs). However, despite its widespread use, it presents several critical issues. First of all, it was developed in a context very different from the current Italian one, since it was built on data collected in 2002 in 8 medium-large US university EDs. It is therefore not possible to take for granted that this indicator can accurately describe the current crowding conditions of Italian EDs. Furthermore, the factors that make up the NEDOCS are often calculated differently by the various hospital facilities, compromising the comparability of the estimates.

Fenice has proposed a new indicator to measure the level of crowding in EDs. The indicator was developed to measure one of the objective consequences of crowding in EDs, namely the increase in waiting time for patients with a problem classified as minor urgency or deferrable to triage (codes 3 and 4). In parallel, the Fenice study has shown that NEDOCS is not very sensitive to this objective consequence of crowding.

The aim of this study is to evaluate, in a national multicenter context, the degree of agreement between the Fenice indicator and the perception of crowding of the operators of the ER and to compare this agreement with that between NEDOCS and the perception of the operators.

Enrollment: 828 estimated patients

Sex: All

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

Patients that are in EDs at the time of the survey

Exclusion criteria

Patients that are in EDs, but not at the time of the survey

Trial design

828 participants in 1 patient group

Elegible population

Description:

All patients arrived in ED during the year 2024 and patientes arrived in the period of active monitoring of the perception of crowding.