Assessing the Compliance of Emergency Department of Hospital Performance with Clinical Guidelines: A Case Study

Abstract

Background. Clinical guidelines are texts developed to assist both physicians and patients in deciding on the most appropriate health care. This study evaluated the compliance of emergency performance with clinical guidelines at Sina Medical Training Center in Tabriz. Methods. This descriptive-analytical study was conducted on a case study at Sina Hospital under the supervision of Tabriz University of Medical Sciences. In the first stage, as a research tool, a checklist, approved in terms of validity and reliability, was set up to evaluate clinical guidelines. The second phase of this study was cross-sectional, conducted in a period of one month. All medical records of people referring to level 1 and 2 triage were reviewed based on the checklist and the data were entered into SPSS software, and since the normality of the data was confirmed, descriptive statistics and parametric tests (t-test and ANOVA) were used to analyze the data. Results. Considering the mean (1.72 ± 0.097) in this study, the adherence to clinical guidelines seems to be higher than average. The results also showed that there was no significant relationship between any of the demographic variables and the mean score of total compliance with the guidelines (P-value> 0.05). However, among other variables, a significant relationship was found between the place of the patient's visit as well as the type and time of patient assignment on the one hand and the average score of total compliance with the guidelines (P-value<0.05). With regard to the results of the regression test, patient’s place of visit was the only appropriate variable to predict the average of the total observance of emergency clinical guidelines (P-value<0.05). Conclusion. Considering the effect of influential variables such as location of the patient's visit, the time and type of patient assignment on the observance of the guidelines and the increasing improvement of the situation of these variables, the average observance of clinical guidelines can be improved further