Indicated trauma emergency department utilization – A comparison between patients’ self-assessment and professional evaluation

•Misuse of emergency departments in hospitals is a well-known problem.•Most patients assessed their case as urgent with moderate to high severity.•In contrast, ED staff rated less than a third of all patients as emergency cases.•ED staff believed that a significant portion of medical problems could be treated by a GP. Patient visits to emergency departments (EDs) increase in many countries. As a result, these facilities are often congested and the socioeconomic burden of growing workload is a well-known problem. In this study, patients’ reasons attending an ED with non-emergent needs were analyzed. From October 2015 to March 2016 patients (n = 499), attending the ED of an academic teaching hospital without referral from a General Practitioner (GP) were surveyed regarding circumstances of their visit, a self-assessment of illness-severity, and reasons for choosing the ED instead of a GP. Results were compared to responses of ED staff (n = 40). Most patients assessed their case as urgent (patients: 65% vs. ED staff: 28%, p