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NOS | Jeroen van Eijndhoven
NOS News•yesterday, 1:09 p.m.•yesterday adjusted, 4:54 p.m
People with mental health problems in particular often turn to a family doctor. Nivel researchers come to this conclusion based on figures from 2022. People with psychological complaints are among the “frequent users” of the posts. This means they call more than twenty times a year.
The family doctor office is intended for urgent complaints that cannot wait until your family doctor is available during office hours. However, many complaints that end up in the emergency room are not recognized as such by healthcare providers.
On average, one in every 50 contacts that GP services have has with a patient who calls very often. In more than a quarter of cases there are psychological problems, especially anxiety problems. “Although this is a small group of patients, the impact on the postal service can still be significant due to the high frequency of contact,” concludes Nivel.
In 2022, 16.1 percent of Dutch people visited their family doctor’s emergency room at least once. Infants, small children and older people in particular came to the family doctor’s emergency room with complaints. These groups were not heavy consumers: they were people between the ages of 44 and 65, 65 percent of whom were women.
According to the researchers, people who call frequently are more likely to have complaints that could have waited for their own primary care doctor than people who only call the emergency room occasionally.
“We have found in other studies that there are sometimes patients who contact the post office hundreds of times a year,” explains researcher Lotte Ramerman. “That was the reason to study these patients specifically to find out whether these patients were actually contributing to the masses.”
Nursing under pressure
According to Ramerman, this is an urgent issue. “The use of care from primary care emergency services continues to increase, which puts this care under pressure. This short study shows that this particular group certainly has a part to play.”
In her opinion, there is sufficient reason for further research “to gain more insight into what different primary care emergency services use to provide the right care for this group.”
The Nivel study shows that general practitioners do not currently deal with anxious people in the same way everywhere. Some general practitioners work closely with psychiatric care, others have an assistant in the psychiatric practice as a backup to call back the patient.
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