Last reviewed · How we verify
Effectiveness and Clinical Outcomes of Municipal Acute Wards Versus a General Hospital
NA trial testing Level of healthcare services in Patient Experience in 164 participants. Completed in 31 January 2021.
| Lead sponsor | Ostfold University College |
|---|---|
| Phase | NA |
| Status | Completed |
| Study type | INTERVENTIONAL |
| Allocation | randomized |
| Design | parallel |
| Masking | none |
| Primary purpose | health services research |
| Enrollment | 164 |
| Start date | 1 September 2019 |
| Primary completion | 31 January 2021 |
| Estimated completion | 31 January 2021 |
| Sites | 1 location across Norway |
Ostfold University College
18 and older, any sex, with Patient Experience or Medical Emergencies. Patients with the condition only — healthy volunteers not accepted.
Per-arm endpoint measurements with 95% confidence intervals where reported. Source: trial results section.
Norwegian Patient Experience Questionnaire. Six of the eight NORPEQ items sum to produce an overall scale from 0 to 100, where 100 is the best possible experience of care. If respondents had missing values on more than half of the items, mean scores will be imputed.
| Group | Value | 95% CI |
|---|---|---|
| Hospital | 78.7 | ± 15.5 |
| Municipal Acute Ward | 80.9 | ± 9.8 |
Demographic changes in the industrialized world are expected to prompt a need for better organized and more efficient health care services. In order to curb costs, health care providers in many countries are searching for viable alternatives to hospitalizations. Norwegian white papers and reform documents presume that the municipalities will play a central role in meeting the growth in demand for health services. Central public policy documents and national research strategies highlight that we need pathways characterized by good quality and safe care, and which are responsive to needs, based on user involvement, continuity of care and successful collaboration within and between service levels. The 2012 Coordination Reform placed new responsibilities on municipalities in the delivery of primary health care services and on hospitals as deliverers of specialist services, as well as on the integration and collaboration between the two organizational levels. This reform mandates that all 428 Norwegian municipalities are obliged to establish or co-operate on establishing Municipal Acute Wards (MAW) (In Norwegian: Kommunale akutte døgnplasser), so as to alleviate pressure on hospitals. However, the research basis for these units is relatively weak. Hence, there is little information on the outcomes regarding the quality, cost-effectiveness, patient-reported as well as personnel-reported outcomes of this new level of care. This study aims at assessing the outcome of admissions to MAWs compared to a general hospital for patients in need of acute care, that can be treated at a lower and decentralized level of health care, with potentially less resources than traditional hospitalizations. The study will use a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) design. It builds on previous research and systematic reviews, and aims to assess several outcomes, patient experiences (NORPEQ), health-related quality of life, short-term mortality and morbidity, and draws on linkages to national registers. The primary hypothesis is that there is no difference in patient experiences between admissions to a MAW versus a hospital. The secondary hypothesis was that there is no difference in outcomes such as readmission, length of stay, self-assessed health-related quality of life (HRQoL) measured by the EuroQol 5 items 5 level (EQ-5D-5L) index, and health status measured by the RAND-12, between patients admitted to a MAW versus a hospital
1 peer-reviewed publication reference this trial (live from Europe PMC):
Verify or expand the search:
Currently open trials in the same condition.
Trials by the same sponsor.
Drug Landscape aggregates and links these public records for informational use only. Always verify against the primary source before clinical or regulatory decisions. Canonical URL: https://druglandscape.com/trial/NCT03885206.
Primary sources · FDA · ClinicalTrials.gov · EMA · SEC EDGAR · ChEMBL · Wikidata · full sourcing