Clinical Assessment Unit

Clinical Assessment Units are wards to which emergency department decants patients who are are waiting on acquisition of resources (diagnostics and consults) for 24 hrs or more before they are safely returned to community. At some time these were considered part of the ER, but as of 2020-10 they are all Family Medicine. Special collection instructions applied at some point, but now they are simply one of the many units we don't collect on.

Site Specific information

How these are collected differs at the different sites. See for more info:

• GRA CAU
• HSC CAU
• STB CAU

WRHA ER models of care plan article

WRHA Models of ER Care article (2017-10-02)

Do we actually need to differentiate these from wards?

Email between Julie and Tina Jan 2021; Julie does not recall any requests for info about CAUs as distinct from wards. So, we could retire the CAU entries in s_dispo table and ask collectors to start using <site>_ward.

A quick review of the data shows that collectors are using CAUs even now. Possibly more concerningly, when CAU is the Previous location , about 5% coded the pre-admit location as NA/Not applicable, the rest coded it as same CAU, except for a few who are mixing CAU and ER in these.

See sql for this

SELECT L_Log.D_ID, s_dispo_1.location_name AS pre_admit, s_dispo.location_name AS previous, s_dispo_2.location_name AS dispo, L_Log.Accept_DtTm, L_Log.Arrive_DtTm, L_Log.Dispo_DtTm FROM ((L_Log INNER JOIN s_dispo ON L_Log.Previous_Location = s_dispo.dispo_ID) INNER JOIN s_dispo AS s_dispo_2 ON L_Log.Dispo = s_dispo_2.dispo_ID) INNER JOIN s_dispo AS s_dispo_1 ON L_Log.Pre_admit_Inpatient_Institution = s_dispo_1.dispo_ID WHERE (((s_dispo.location_name) Like "*CAU")) OR (((s_dispo_1.location_name) Like "*CAU")) OR (((s_dispo_2.location_name) Like "*CAU"));