The quality and efficiency of care for older patients at the emergency department

Due to ageing of the population and consequently increasing incidence of multimorbidity, a huge influx of older patients to the emergency department (ED) will be inevitable. The main aim of this thesis was to contribute to the knowledge on emergency care processes that can be largely divided in organisational factors, such as ED crowding, the weekendeffect (poor patient outcome due to altered care during weekends) and triage on the one hand and patient-related factors such as atypical disease presentation and polypharmacy on the other. The studies in this thesis were performed to obtain more information regarding current emergency care use by older patients (≥ 65 years old) and address some knowledge gaps, that helps to identify factors for improvement and ultimately may improve the care of older patients in the ED.