A new model for dealing with patients who frequently arrive spontaneously at hospital emergency departments requiring health care: a pilot study

Patients who repeatedly seek care directly at hospital based somatic emergency departments take up a large proportion of health care resources, at the same time they appear to experience low satisfaction with the care they receive  The purposes of this pilot study were to describe: I) the development of a team model for taking care of frequent visitors to  a somatic hospital based  ED; II) Eventual changes, over six months, in costs and patients’ health care utilization related to pilot testing the model and III), the team’s experiences of  implementing the model. A mixed method convergent parallel design was used. The development of the model began as a top-down process and later on in the process into a bottom-up approach once the inter-professional team became involved. The new model functioned as a support for all 12 patients included in the study and collectively their visits decreased by a total of 55%. The inference quality description is that such a management induced project may be accepted and actively applied when those involved experience freedom to structure the project. The freedom of being able to structure the model led to steps being taken that were beyond the project’s original limitations.