Objectives: To analyze the social emergency caused by vulnerability situations or exclusion risk discovered through the health service SAMU in the city of Valencia.
Method: To do it mixed methodology has been used. For the quantitative part 195 questionnaires were collected in the eight SAMU mobile units, all of them were completed during services, descriptive and inferential statistics were used. For qualitative part semi-structured interviews were performed to SAMU and SAUS professionals. Categories and qualitative matrix was analyzed with ATLAS.tiv7.
Results: From a total of 195 emergencies, 35 (17.9%) were attended on Tuesday. December was the month in which most emergencies were presented 48 (24.6%). 54.7% took place between 9 and 16 hours, of which 93 (47.7%) out of the SAUS working hours. From emergencies, 84 (50.5%) did not require transfer to hospital, compared to 83 (49.5%) than were required. SAMU units asked for social intervention in 27 (14%) cases, 24 (89%) required transfer to hospital. There was a significant (0.000), existing relationship between emergencies requiring hospital transfer by the SAMU and requiring social intervention. In interviews is demonstrated detection by the SAMU and intervention by the SAUS of social emergency. Of the qualitative results, we obtained that the SAMU across his sanitary emergencies detects social needs subject to valuation and intervention for SAUS.
Conclusions: This study shows that SAMU of Valencia is a social emergency detector subject to social intervention in their daily work. The results support the proposal of a service that runs 24 hours seven days a week.