Use and misuse of emergency medical services by neurological patients presenting to a Greek Tertiary Health Care facility

Background With a population of about 1,000,000 inhabitants, Metropolitan Thessaloniki is the second largest town in Greece and the capital of the region of Macedonia. Among the city's 12 public hospitals, Papageorgiou General Hospital is one of its four tertiary health care facilities. In the metropolitan areas of Athens and Thessaloniki, public hospitals are on-call not on a daily, but on a one-in-four-days rotation basis. This system leads to an immense number of patients that presents every day to the Emergency Outpatient Departments (EOD) of Greek public hospitals, but exact data on the use (and maybe misuse) of public health facilities remain scarce.