ABSTRACT

Introduction: Emergency departments (ED) are notified by the ambulance clinicians before their arrival; this notification is called a “pre-alert”. Studies have shown that pre-alerting EDs for patients requiring time critical treatment have shown to improve initiation of early treatment and patient outcomes. appropriate use of pre-alerts can help to improve patient care and outcome. This study was conducted to determine the compliance of pre-alerts with pre-alert guidelines.
Methodology: This was a cross-sectional study conducted in the ED of University Hospital Waterford and data for 71 pre-alerts was evaluated. Data was collected via a pre-existing proforma. All the pre-alerts were evaluated against National pre-alert guidelines to see whether they were rightly meeting the pre-alert criteria or were potentially inappropriately pre-alerted. IBM SPSS V.20 was used to analyse the data.
Results: In the study population 38(53.5%) were males and the mean age of the patient was 63.28±25.1 years. The most common reason for pre-alert to the ED was stroke accounting for 31% of the pre-alerts. 16.9% of the pre-alerts were for patients with breathing problems. Analysis showed that 62(87.3%) of the requests had one or more than one criterion meeting the standards for pre-alert and hence were rightly pre-alerted, while 9(12.7%) pre-alerts were not meeting any physiological or diagnostic criteria for pre-alert.
Conclusion: This study demonstrates overall good compliance with the majority of pre-alerts in keeping with guidelines. However, almost a quarter of pre-alerts were not meeting clinical or diagnostic criteria for pre-alerts research is required to ascertain the reasons behind these calls.

KEYWORDS

Pre-alert, Emergency department, Pre-hospital notification.

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