Emergency care settings in Ireland have struggled with a high volume of service users in recent years. This nationwide crisis led to the establishment of the National Emergency Medicine Programme Strategy in 2012, which identified two key performance indicators for efficiency in emergency care: the patient experience time, which should not exceed six hours from the time of registration to the time of discharge; and patients who do not wait for treatment (DNW) should make up less than 5% of those attending emergency care services. This article explores a quality initiative to improve DNW rates using scheduled return clinics, implemented by a group of advanced nurse practitioners in an emergency department in a Dublin hospital. It reviews the literature on scheduled return clinics and discusses the rationale for the initiative, its implementation, barriers to its introduction and an audit of its effectiveness.
Emergency Nurse. 25, 10, 31-34. doi: 10.7748/en.2018.e1787
Correspondence Conflict of interestNone declared
Peer reviewThis article has been subject to external double-blind review and has been checked for plagiarism using automated software
Write for usFor information about writing for RCNi journals, contact writeforus@rcni.com
For author guidelines, go to rcni.com/writeforus
Received: 19 September 2017
Accepted: 07 November 2017
or
Alternatively, you can purchase access to this article for the next seven days. Buy now
Are you a student? Our student subscription has content especially for you.
Find out more