LKH Bregenz

A new outpatient clinic to relieve the burden on hospitals

The primary care outpatient clinic at Bregenz LKH(Bild: mathis.studio)

The first primary care outpatient clinic (EVA) in Vorarlberg will go into operation at Bregenz Regional Hospital on October 1. Its main purpose is to direct the flow of patients in the right direction.

The EVA is a first point of contact upstream of the hospital for all patients without an appointment. Qualified healthcare and nursing staff determine the urgency level of treatment there. Depending on the assessment, patients are taken straight to a specialist outpatient clinic, while others have to wait a long time - in this sense, the EVA is also an "educational measure". Or as Gerald Fleisch, Managing Director of Vorarlberger Krankenhaus-Betriebsgesellschaft, puts it: "The EVA is not an additional medical care service, but serves to allocate patients correctly." This preliminary stage has also become necessary because more and more people are visiting the hospital who could actually be treated in private practice.

Triage according to international standards
Patients are assessed in the EVA according to the international standard, the Manchester Triage System (MTS). The MTS distinguishes between five different levels of urgency, from "non-urgent" to "immediate". Experience from other federal states shows that around 70 percent of EVA patients do not need a hospital examination. The remaining 30 percent actually require the special care of a specialist outpatient clinic in hospital or are admitted as inpatients.

"Because the majority of those patients who come to the emergency outpatient clinic without an appointment do not actually need care from hospital specialists, we need to tighten up our patient management," says the responsible provincial councillor Martina Rüscher (ÖVP). She also reminds us that the formula "digital before outpatient before inpatient" applies. Hospital care is only the last step.