[Urgent Visits to Nursing Homes: A General Practitioner's Perspective]. / Dringende Hausbesuche in Altenheimen ­ ein Status Quo aus hausärztlicher Sicht.

AIM OF THE STUDY: Due to demographic changes, home visits to nursing care facilities are increasing. Urgent home visits represent a challenge for general practitioners. There are no recommendations for the implementation of urgent home visits. Therefore, in this study, we investigated how GP practices deal with urgent home visits and what improvements can be made to the medical emergency care. METHODS: A total of 15 teaching doctors of the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Bonn were interviewed using semi-structured interviews on the subject. We evaluated the interviews with the qualitative content analysis according to Mayring. RESULTS: Urgent house visits were requested by telephone or fax. The home visits were carried out usually after the consultation hours during the lunch break of the doctors. General practitioners consider forwarding the request for a house visit to the rescue service as an absolute exception. At the nursing home, there were waiting times until the responsible nursing staff could do a joint emergency visit. In addition, there were clear differences in the qualifications of nurses and in dealing with emergencies. The physicians therefore saw improvements in their ability to provide further training to the nursing staff, to preventive house visits, and to assess the urgency of home visits. CONCLUSION: To improve emergency care in elderly homes, the suggestions for improvement proposed by the family doctors should be tested in controlled studies. In addition, the cooperation between general practitioners and nursing homes could be strengthened by joint training in geriatric emergency care.