You are working a busy shift in your busy emergency department (ED), when you are called by the microbiologist about a positive blood culture gram stain on a patient discharged home. You call the patient’s caregiver and they relay that the patient is doing well. You believe that the culture may be a contaminant from skin flora, but ask the patient and their caregiver to return to the ED for reassessment, possible admission …

Welcome back to our second post on the Ontario Emergency Department (ED) Return Visit Quality Program (RVQP). In our first post we discussed the utility of return ED visits as triggers for potential quality improvement (QI) initiatives. We also discussed the scope of this program, which is a provincial-level program with many stakeholder organizations. The program was built with the goal of promoting “high-quality ED care by helping clinicians and hospitals identify, audit …