ArticleEmergency medicine journal : EMJ2024
Is emergency doctors' tolerance of clinical uncertainty on a novel measure associated with doctor well-being, healthcare resource use and patient outcomes?
Article in Emergency medicine journal : EMJ, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Organisational Problems, Role Stress, and Job Satisfaction Among Emergency Department Workers: A Multicenter Mixed-Effects Study.Journal of evaluation in clinical practice · 2026Article
- Geriatric critical care assessment: key considerations.European geriatric medicine · 2026Review
- When emergency physicians meet patients displaying irritable behaviours: a randomised vignette-based experiment investigating physicians' emotions and clinical reasoning.BMJ quality & safety · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
14 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
introductionEmergency doctors routinely face uncertainty-they work with limited patient information, under tight time constraints and receive minimal post-discharge feedback. While higher uncertainty tolerance (UT) among staff is linked with reduced resource use and improved well-being in various specialties, its impact in emergency settings is underexplored. We aimed to develop a UT measure and assess associations with doctor-related factors (eg, experience), patient outcomes (eg, reattendance) and resource use (eg, episode costs).
methodsFrom May 2021 to February 2022, emergency doctors (specialty trainee 3 and above) from five Yorkshire (UK) departments completed an online questionnaire. This included a novel UT measure-an adapted Physicians' Reaction to Uncertainty scale collaboratively modified within our team according to Hillen
results39 doctors were matched with 384 patients. The UT measure demonstrated high reliability (Cronbach's
conclusionsWe developed a reliable UT measure for emergency medicine. While higher UT was linked to doctor well-being, its impact on resource use and patient outcomes remains unclear. Further measure validation and additional research including intervention trials are necessary to confirm these findings and explore the implications of UT in emergency practice.
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