[Dermatological emergencies. Prospective and multicentric study in Argentina]

Dermatological emergencies are a frequent reason for emergency departments consultation. In order to determine the prevalence of dermatological emergencies, to describe the kind of dermatological diseases that present as emergencies, to analyze the coincidence between the diagnoses received by the patients in those cases with a previous consultations for the same cutaneous manifestation, and to analyze the behavior according to the health system segment in which they were attended: public segment and private segment; a prospective, observational, analytical, cross-sectional and multi-center study was carried out. Two thousand eight hundred one patients were included. The prevalence of consultations for dermatological emergencies in adults was 15% in the same time period (public segment: 10.6 and private segment: 22.5%, p < 0.05). The consultation was due to an infectious disease in 35.5%, allergic in 29.6% and neoplastic in 8.6%; 0.7% of patients were hospitalized. In 31.7% of patients who had a previous consultation, a coincidence was found between the diagnoses made in 80.7% of those attended by a dermatologist, and 52.6% evaluated by non-dermatologist physician. The high prevalence of dermatological consultations and the existing differences in the probability of receiving an appropriate diagnosis according to the specialization of the intervening professional, show the importance of the presence of dermatology-trained physicians in the emergency area.