[Patient care in an out-of-hours care practice - a descriptive study of the CONTENT project]

Little published research is available about the content of out of hours care (OOHC) in Germany. CONTENT is a project of the University Hospital Heidelberg to build up a morbidity registry for ambulatory health care. One of the participating practices of the network is a rural OOHC centre. The study reports exemplarily on the work of this practice.

The design of the study is cross-sectional. One of the 2 available CONTENT practice-softwares was used for data retrieval. The softwares allow for classifying reasons for encounter (RFE), health problems (diagnoses) and processes of care with the International Classification of Primary Care (ICPC-2). Furthermore the softwares allow for pseudonymised data export.

A 3-year period with 15 886 patient contacts of 9 542 patients (65.9% female) is described. Close to 8% of the population in the catchment area visited the practice at least once in a year. Medium age of the patients was 42 years (range 0-104). The groups of the 25-44-year-old and the 45-64-year-old patients formed together 43% of all contacts. The most frequent RFE were: fever (5.8%), sore throat (4.8%), cough (4.8%), earache (3.9%) and insect bites (3.6%). Frequencies of these RFEs differed considerably between the age groups. With the help of the data, resulting diagnoses and care processes can be described in detail.

This study describes, for the first time in Germany, the work of an OOHC practice. Data capture to accomplish this was feasible within existing practice software and without much extra work. If more OOHC practices would participate in the CONTENT project a more representative picture of OOHC in Germany could be established.