EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES RELATED TO THE GENERAL PRACTITIONERS PRACTICES
EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES RELATED TO THE GENERAL PRACTITIONERS PRACTICES

Summary/Abstract: Background: Healthcare system in Bulgaria has been involved into almost 20-years long transformation process. Along with the implementation of the best European and world practices a myriad of challenges are to be faced and adequately solved. One of these challenges is related to the prehospital medical support provision to the population. The old system was totally erased and the net of general practitioners' practices was established. Due to several demographic, social, geographical and other particularities the population medical coverage by the specialists in general medicine is still far from the desired level. Moreover, even into the big cities of the country, there are a lot of citizens that are not receiving the medical attendance they are expecting. Aim: The objective of this study is to analyze the relation between the general practitioners practice shortfalls and the emergency department overload. Materials and Methods: In order to achieve the set goal descriptive and comparative methods were applied. The described not met by the general practitioners citizens expectations are compared with the most frequent causes for medical checks recorded into the Saint George University Hospital for Active Treatment Emergency Department for period of three years. Analyzed are mainly the patients admitted with not life-threatening conditions. Results and Discussions: The thoroughly performed analyses present several factors explaining why patients deliberately are omitting their general practitioners and are directly heading to the Emergency Department. These factors are grouped into six groups and are one of the reasons for recorded overcrowding of the emergency departments nowadays.

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