Advanced Practice Nurse Specializing in Emergency Care and Post-emergency Consultation: Feasibility Study (CPU - IPA)

Centre Hospitalier Régional Metz-Thionville

Status: Completed

Conditions: Healthcare Access

Study type: Observational

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT07405073

2025-05-Obs-CHRMT

Details and patient eligibility

About

Emergency departments are facing increasing overload, exacerbated by difficulties in accessing primary care. This saturation impacts the fluidity of care pathways and the quality of care.

A major challenge is the high rate of short-term repeat visits, which increases the workload. These early returns may be due to an unexpected change in the patient's condition, but also to the difficulty of obtaining a quick appointment with a general practitioner, due to a shortage of practitioners or a lack of available slots within a few days.

Full description

In this context, the implementation of a Post-Emergency Consultation by an Advanced Practice Nurse could be a solution to improve patient follow-up and limit these avoidable return visits.

Main objective: Identify the profiles of patients who return for a second consultation within 15 days of their first visit to the emergency department.

Secondary objectives:

• Describe the characteristics of these patients (age, gender, medical history, pathologies, reasons for the initial consultation, reasons for the repeat consultation).
• Analyze medical records to assess whether a post-emergency consultation by an APN could have prevented this repeat consultation.

Enrollment: 328 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18+ years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Patients who visited the emergency department at 15-day intervals during the study period

Exclusion criteria

• Patients hospitalized at the time of the first consultation