Date of Award

2018

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Health Administration

College

College of Health Professions

First Advisor

James S Zoller

Second Advisor

Rhonique Shields

Third Advisor

Walter J. Jones

Abstract

Objective: A critical analysis of the impact on urgent care facility expansion and its effects towards reducing non-urgent visits to the emergency departments in the state of Florida from 2011-2015. Methods: Through the IBM SPSS tool, we performed a multilinear regression analysis on the dependent variable emergency department’s (ED’s) non-urgent visits with three independent variables, urgent care facilities growth, population totals, and uninsured totals per year. Secondary data was used capturing non-urgent visits presented in the ED linked to counties in Florida that maintain licensed urgent care facilities during the periods of 2011 to 2015 (29 out of 67 counties selected for this study). Results: The outcome indicated no correlation between non-urgent ED visits and urgent care growth. However, through the multilinear regression coefficient model, results showed urgent care centers growth rate (P=.043) and population growth rate (P=.045) are statistically significant (P<.05) to predicting the rate of non-urgent patients presenting in the ED per year. Therefore, per one urgent care facility expansion impacts a reduction of 675 non-urgent patient visits to the emergency department per year. Conclusion: In this study, we looked at the impact of urgent care facilities as a possible factor to reducing non-urgent visits to the emergency department. Although there was no immediate correlation between the independent variables and the dependent variable, there were a statistical significant indicator that urgent care growth impacts the path and reduction of non-urgent visits to the ED. The results, however are not conclusive enough to determine urgent care facility as the sole method of prevention towards resolving the misuse of the ED visits. A more deeper look in alternative preventive methods are to be considered along with factoring in urgent care facilities as one of many methods to aid in reducing the overuse of emergency departments.

Rights

All rights reserved. Copyright is held by the author.

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