Summary. Emergency departments and units in Russia differ from similar heath care facilities abroad in that they handle house calls which results in high utilization of the service.

The major difference between emergency departments and units and other health care facilities is that they move around the catchment area handling emergency calls while other health care facilities provide services indoors. Catchment areas of emergency departments and units differ in their utilization rates, quality and mileage of roads, distance to the referral facility for hospitalization, availability of communication tools, and other factors. Therefore, performance indicators applicable to health care facilities cannot be applied to emergency units or departments; while differences between catchment areas make it impossible to conduct comparative performance evaluation of different emergency units.

Currently each emergency unit has its own indicators to evaluate performance of its subunits, teams and staff. Some units use as much as 130 performance indicators. However, current indicators fail to estimate the correct number of teams needed, to assess quality of teams’ management and ensure differential remuneration of medical staff.

The article presents methods for estimating average daily work-load of a unit, subunit, emergency team and medical staff to ensure determination of the optimal number of teams to timely hands all emergency calls, territorial distribution of teams, quality management of teams and differential remuneration based on amount of services provided.

Keywords: emergency unit; performance evaluation; optimal number of emergency teams; differential remuneration.

References

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