Advanced Practice Nurse Specializing in Emergency Care and Post-emergency Consultation: Feasibility Study

Advanced Practice Nurse Specializing in Emergency and Post-emergency Care: Towards Improved Unscheduled Care?

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.

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.

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