Abstract

The requirements of patients might necessitate intrahospital patient transfers, which include the shifting of care responsibilities between hospital units. The patients who are admitted to the emergency department (ED) usually had a greater severity that necessitates emergent attention and might require admission to the intensive care unit (ICU). Delaying this procedure puts the patients at risk of experiencing poor outcomes. The phenomenon of delayed admission of patients to the ICU has a growing incidence and is presumed to hurt patient outcomes. ED length of stay (LOS) is a potential indicator to evaluate ED efficiency, especially for cases requiring hospitalization. This review aimed to assess the effect of the time taken to transfer patients from the ED to the ICU on the outcomes of patients by reviewing the previous studies conducted on this subject. Obtaining articles to write this review required searching via scientific databases and using several related terms. The eligible articles were those officially published original English articles conducted on the adult population available for full-text and published after 2016. A total of ten studies met the criteria and were enrolled, with a total number of 12,365 patients who were transferred from the ED to the ICU. Prolonged time before admission to ICU, including ED LOS and the time to transfer patients from ED to ICU, had adverse impacts on the patients' outcomes. Also, the increase in time in the ED before admission to the ICU increased the rates of adverse outcomes.

Key words: Impact, outcomes, ICU, ED, transfer time, length of stay, systematic review.