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

Background. Clinical guidelines are texts developed to assist both physicians and patients in deciding on the most appropriate health care. This study aimed to evaluate 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 affiliated with Tabriz University of Medical Sciences. In the first stage, a checklist, approved in terms of validity and reliability, was used as a research tool to evaluate the 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. 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) obtained in this study, the adherence to clinical guidelines was probably higher than the average. The results also showed that there was no significant relationship between the demographic variables and the mean score of total compliance with the guidelines (P-value> 0.05). As for other variables, however, it was found that the place of patient's visit as well as the time and type of patient assignment had a significant relationship with the average score of total compliance with the guidelines (P-value<0.05). The results from the regression test revealed that the patient’s place of visit was the only variable able to predict the average of the total observance of emergency clinical guidelines (P-value<0.05).
Conclusion. Taking into account the effects of influential variables (e.g., location of the patient's visit as well as the time and type of patient assignment) on the observance of the guidelines and improvement of these variables’ situation, the average observance of clinical guidelines may have been considerably improved.