Avoiding hospitalisation: effective primary care interventions

Abstract

Ambulatory care sensitive conditions (ACSCs) “represent a range of conditions for which hospitalisation should be able to be avoided because the disease or condition has been prevented from occurring, or because individuals have had access to timely and effective primary care”. This RESEARCH ROUNDup investigates the factors that may predict avoidable hospital admissions. It also provides an overview of interventions that may be effective in reducing avoidable hospitalisations, and follows from a previous issue that examined the scope of ACSCs in Australia, and their reliability as a measure of primary health care (PHC) performance.