ArticleThe British journal of general practice : the journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners2011
Primary care access and its relationship with emergency department utilisation: an observational, cross-sectional, ecological study.
Article in The British journal of general practice : the journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 34 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
34 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 66 citations in OpenAlex.
- Which features of primary care affect unscheduled secondary care use? A systematic review.BMJ open · 2014Pooled it
- Therapist and computer-based brief interventions for drug use within a randomized controlled trial: effects on parallel trajectories of alcohol use, cannabis use and anxiety symptoms.Addiction (Abingdon, England) · 2020Trial
- Sexual HIV risk behavior outcomes of brief interventions for drug use in an inner-city emergency department: Secondary outcomes from a randomized controlled trial.Drug and alcohol dependence · 2018Trial
- Computer-enhanced interventions for drug use and HIV risk in the emergency room: preliminary results on psychological precursors of behavior change.Journal of substance abuse treatment · 2014Trial
- Trends in acute specialist contacts following a primary care contact 2012-21-a registry-based study.Scandinavian journal of primary health care · 2026Article
- Article
- Did a national extended access scheme translate to improvements in patient experience to GP services in England? A retrospective observational study using patient-level data from the English GP patient survey.BMC health services research · 2025Observational
- Neighbourhood socioeconomic conditions and emergency admissions for ambulatory care sensitive conditions in children: a longitudinal ecological analysis in England, 2012-2017.BMJ paediatrics open · 2025Article
- Observational
- The "better data, better planning" census: a cross-sectional, multi-centre study investigating the factors influencing patient attendance at the emergency department in Ireland.BMC health services research · 2022Article
- Are more GPs associated with a reduction in emergency hospital admissions? A quantitative study on GP referral in England.The British journal of general practice : the journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners · 2021Article
- Effect of Access to After-Hours Primary Care on the Association Between Home Nursing Visits and Same-Day Emergency Department Use.Annals of family medicine · 2020Article
- Examining the Association between Community-Level Marginalization and Emergency Room Wait Time in Ontario, Canada.Healthcare policy = Politiques de sante · 2020Article
- Partnering with patients to improve access to primary care.BMJ open quality · 2020Article
- Factors associated with emergency room visits and hospitalisation amongst low-income public rental flat dwellers in Singapore.BMC public health · 2019Article
- Article
- Emergency Department Use and Enrollment in a Medical Home Providing After-Hours Care.Annals of family medicine · 2018Article
- Is the use of emergency departments socially patterned?International journal of public health · 2018Observational
- Population and patient factors affecting emergency department attendance in London: retrospective cohort analysis of linked primary and secondary care records.The British journal of general practice : the journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners · 2018Article
- Seven-day access to NHS primary care: how does England compare with Europe?Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine · 2018Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundRecent health service policies in the UK have focused on improving primary care access in order to reduce the use of costly emergency department services, even though the relationship between the two is based on weak or little evidence. Research is required to establish whether improving primary care access can influence emergency department attendance.
aimTo ascertain whether a relationship exists between the degree of access to GP practices and avoidable emergency department attendances in an inner-London primary care trust (PCT). DESIGN AND
settingObservational, cross-sectional ecological study in 68 general practices in Brent Primary Care Trust, north London, UK.
methodGP practices were used as the unit of analysis and avoidable emergency department attendance as the dependent variable. Routinely collected data from GP practices, Hospital Episode Statistics, and census data for the period covering 2007-2009 were used across three broad domains: GP access characteristics, population characteristics, and health status aggregated to the level of the GP practice. Multiple linear regression was used to ascertain which variables account for the variation in emergency department attendance experienced by patients registered to each GP practice.
resultsNone of the GP access variables accounted for the variation in emergency department attendance. The only variable that explained this variance was the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD). For every unit increase in IMD score of the GP practice, there would be an increase of 6.13 (95% CI = 4.56, 7.70) per 1000 patients per year in emergency department attendances. This accounted for 47.9% of the variance in emergency department attendances in Brent.
conclusionAvoidable emergency department attendance appears to be mostly driven by underlying deprivation rather than by the degree of access to primary care.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.