title: Making recording and analysis of chief complaint a priority for global emergency care research in low-income countries.
abstract: The chief complaint is a patient's self-reported primary reason for presenting for medical care. The clinical utility and analytical importance of recording chief complaints have been widely accepted in highly developed emergency care systems, but this practice is far from universal in global emergency care, especially in limited-resource areas. It is precisely in these settings, however, that the use of chief complaints may have particular benefit. Chief complaints may be used to quantify, analyze, and plan for emergency care and provide valuable information on acute care needs where there are crucial data gaps. Globally, much work has been done to establish local practices around chief complaint collection and use, but no standards have been established and little work has been done to identify minimum effective sets of chief complaints that may be used in limited-resource settings. As part of the Academic Emergency Medicine consensus conference, "Global Health and Emergency Care: A Research Agenda," the breakout group on data management identified the lack of research on emergency chief complaints globally-especially in low-income countries where the highest proportion of the world's population resides-as a major gap in global emergency care research. This article reviews global research on emergency chief complaints in high-income countries with developed emergency care systems and sets forth an agenda for future research on chief complaints in limited-resource settings.
authors.affiliation: The Department of Emergency Medicine, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT.
authors.forename: Hani
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Mowafi
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Dworkis
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Bisanzo
authors.forename: Bhakti
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Hansoti
authors.forename: Phil
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Seidenberg
authors.forename: Ziad
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Obermeyer
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Hauswald
authors.forename: Teri A
authors.initials: TA
authors.lastname: Reynolds
mesh_terms: D003906:Developing Countries; D003937:Diagnosis, Differential; D004635:Emergency Medicine / Q000592:standards*; D005568:Forms and Records Control / Q000458:organization & administration*; D014943:Global Health; D006292:Health Priorities; D006302:Health Services Research; D006751:Hospital Information Systems / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006801:Humans; D008487:Medical History Taking; D011203:Poverty