Emergency medicine journal : EMJ
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There is uncertainty about the best way to measure emergency department crowding. We have previously developed a consensus-based measure of crowding, the International Crowding Measure in Emergency Departments (ICMED). We aimed to obtain pilot data to evaluate the ability of a shortened form of the ICMED, the sICMED, to predict senior emergency department clinicians' concerns about crowding and danger compared with a very well-studied measure of emergency department crowding, the National Emergency Department Overcrowding Score (NEDOCS). ⋯ Both sICMED and NEDOCS can be collected easily in a variety of English hospitals. Further studies are required but initial results suggest both scores may have potential use for assessing crowding variation at long timescales, but are less sensitive to hour-by-hour variation. Correlation in time is an important methodological consideration which, if ignored, may lead to erroneous conclusions. Future studies should account for such correlation in both design and analysis.