Rural populations rely on physicians trained in primary care to provide emergency services. Less is known about primary care’s contribution to emergency services in urban and suburban settings. Two-thirds of family medicine and three-fourths of general internal medicine Medicare claims for emergency care are generated in urban settings, demonstrating primary care’s significant contribution to t...

BACKGROUND The Republic of India, the world's most populous democracy, has struggled with establishing Emergency Medical Care. However, with the recent recognition of Emergency Medicine as a formal specialty in medical training, there has been renewed vigor in the developments in the field. METHOD AND RESULTS We outline here the building blocks of the health care system in India, and the cont...

BACKGROUND Investigations into 'inappropriate' use of emergency health services are limited by the lack of definition of what constitutes a health emergency. Position papers from Australian and international sources emphasise the patient's right to access emergency healthcare, and the responsibility of emergency health care workers to provide treatment to all patients. However, discordance betw...

During emergencies, service agencies rely on telecommunications to achieve quick response times and minimize loss of life and property. The existing public and government-based telephone systems provide three essential communication services: an emergency calling system, which the public uses to report problems and ask for help; emergency communications, which allow for crisis communications wi...

Emergency physicians are routinely confronted with problems associated with language barriers. It is important for emergency health care providers and the health system to strive for cultural competency when communicating with members of an increasingly diverse society. Possible solutions that can be implemented include appropriate staffing, use of new technology, and efforts to develop new kin...

The aid lent by the emergency services is the object of this paper, which aims to assess the emergency service of the QualiSUS program. The study is descriptive with the application of a questionnaire to the responsible of the emergency services in eight hospitals. The emergency services were always overcrowded, and the causes pointed were the low resolutivity of basic attention and the precari...