Thirteen per cent of all Australians visit emergency departments each year, with 2.69 million attendances in NSW. About half of all emergency department visits involve pathology testing, accounting for 52 per cent of non-staffing costs.
Appropriate testing is essential for clinical care, however unnecessary tests not only represent waste in the health system, but can lead to over-diagnosis, over-monitoring with treatment errors, and prolonged emergency department length of stay.
The UNTIE study aims to measure and reduce the number of unnecessary pathology tests ordered, for 35 common emergency department presentations. It will do so by translating the 2013 Australian Guideline into practice.