Abstract
Purpose :
The aim of the study is to evaluate the profile of visits over the past 10 years to Hospital São Paulo Ophthalmic Emergency Room (ER), a 24-hour open-access tertiary eye-care service at Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP) (São Paulo, Brazil)
Methods :
Institutional Review Board approval was obtained. A cross-sectional retrospective chart review of patients that presented to the ophthalmic emergency room of Hospital São Paulo between January 2009 and June 2019 was performed. The following data was retrieved: date and hour, patient age, gender, informed home zip code and ICD-10 (International Classification of Diseases) informed by the physician
Results :
From 2009 to June 2019, there were 597,815 visits to the ophthalmic emergency room, with a mean of 56,410 ± 6,500 visits per year, corresponding to 311,217 (53%) of unique patients during the whole period of analysis. 54.3% of these patients were male. The mean age of patients was 39.75 ± 20.40 years, with 12.34% being over 65 years. The mean number of visits was 157.43 patients per day, with the highest rate detect in the year 2019 with a mean of 186.19 patients per day in 6 months. Visits on Mondays corresponded to 18.2% of total visits, while that on Sundays to 7.7%. Visits between midnight and 5am corresponded to 1.6% of total visits. The most frequently documented ICD-10 diagnoses by physicians were acute conjunctivitis followed by blepharitis, keratitis, corneal foreign body, subconjunctival hemorrhage and ocular trauma
Conclusions :
The data analysis show an increase of 47.21 (+ 33%) visits per day from 2009 to 2019, an important change of inflow. Further data analysis will be made in purpose of improve waiting time, better outcomes and better service staff planning. The reduction of access to 24-h public ophthalmic emergency services in São Paulo and inappropriate use of emergency services with non-urgent conditions as a result of low understanding by the population and difficult to access to ophthalmological services at primary care. Besides creating new public ophthalmic services, is necessary to make them work in collaboration to better distribute the patient care and not overload a few ones. It is also important to optimize the referral system, reducing non-urgent conditions overloading emergency services
This is a 2020 ARVO Annual Meeting abstract.