Dr. Joshua Lipsitz, Dr. Deena Zimmerman
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Abstract |
Study objectives |
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To study the reasons why so many families bring their children to an urgent care center for the chief complaint of fever instead of bringing them to a primary care setting.
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Working hypothesis |
| Parents bring children to urgent care as they believe that fever is a dangerous condition. Due to this concern, they feel that they cannot wait for an appointment in primary care or that primary care lacks the facilities (laboratory tests/radiology/interventions) to properly care for this condition
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Methods |
| To interview by structured questionnaire 350 families that bring children to TEREM Urgent Care Centers for a chief complaint of fever. The questionnaire will be translated into four languages. The study population will be designed to assure sampling from a range of populations including the middle class, new immigrants, the Arab and Ultra-orthodox sectors. |
Significance of the Proposed Research |
| Revealing the reasons for bringing children to urgent care will allow us to build an educational intervention which will work to reduce this phenomenon. Treatment in urgent care has potential negative effects on children in that they are more likely to have invasive testing done in urgent care than in a clinic. Furthermore, the urgent care physician does not provide the same degree of continuity of care. There are also financial downsides to treatment in urgent care centers are this setting of medical care is more costly. Research to date does not address cultural factors that might influence fever phobia among certain subpopulations in Israel. Furthermore, all research on this topic has been conducted in primary care clinics with the exception of one study in hospital emergency departments. There is no research at present in urgent care centers and thus the question why do parents bring their children to urgent care centers rather than to a primary care setting has not been addressed. |