in the emergency room, filter patients to unclog services

Rejected patients and admissions limited to vital emergencies: the triage of patients is a sometimes brutal response to the crisis in hospitals. In Lille (Nord), some of the people who call 15 are redirected. 550,000 calls come in here every year, and they’re not always for life-threatening emergencies. The regulation assistant makes the call to the SAS, the care access service. A GP takes the call. Its support can range from simple advice to finding an appointment.

The SAS has been tested for a year in Lille. An effective response, according to Dr. Roch Joli, the head of the SAMU du Nord department. “There are 10% of people who would have been to the emergency room, to whom we would have already sent an ambulance ourselves, because (…) we had other emergency care offers to offer than going to the emergency room“, he explains. Many visits to the emergency room are thus avoided. Some doctors keep slots for unscheduled care. In 2021, the Lille SAMU SAS made it possible to manage more than 200,000 calls.