Summary
Differences in practice among physicians staffing an emergency department in relation to years of experience
Busca P, Inchaurza E, Illarramendi A, Urbina O, González L, Miró O
Affiliation of the authors
Servicio de Urgencias, Hospital Donostia, San Sebastián, Spain. Área de Urgencias, Hospital Clínic, Barcelona, Spain. Grupo de Investigación “Urgencias: Procesos y Patologías”, IDIBAPS, Barcelona, Spain.
DOI
Quote
Busca P, Inchaurza E, Illarramendi A, Urbina O, González L, Miró O. Differences in practice among physicians staffing an emergency department in relation to years of experience. Emergencias. 2015;27:143-9
Summary
Objectives.
Methods.
management variables (consultation with other specialists, admissions, ambulance requests), diagnostic procedures ordered (simple radiographs, laboratory tests, ultrasound or computed tomography imaging), and time patients discharged home spent in the department (arrival to discharge). We explored relationships between these variables and the emergency physician’s experience using linear regression analysis, followed by the construction of multivariable models to adjust for physician characteristics.
Results.
The physicians’ experience was inversely and independently related to the mean number of patients attended monthly and the percentage of patients assigned a triage level of 1 or 2. Experience was directly and independently related to discharged patients’ time spent in the emergency department and number of simple radiographs ordered. All associations were
small (R2<0.010), however. Those variables continued to show statistically significant associations after increasingly complex modeling to adjust for the following physician variables: physician, age, sex, specialty, residency training in the same hospital).
Conclusions.