[Current status of medical care of emerging infectious diseases at hospital emergency services in Spain].

Background: The aim of this study is to determine the current status of Spanish Hospital Emergency Services (HES) in diagnosing and treating the most prevalent tropical diseases (TD) in Spain.
Methods: A cross-sectional descriptive study was carried out, using a questionnaire in Google Forms® sent to members of the INFURG-SEMES group. The following variables were analyzed: the size of the hospital in terms of number of beds, number of tropical disease emergencies, existence of tropical medicine protocols, urgent diagnostic tests or antimalarial treatment.
Results: The form was sent to 75 hospitals. Responses were obtained from 42 emergency services (55%) in 10 Autonomous Communities. Twenty-four (57.1%) had >500 beds. Only five hospitals (11.9%) have the facilities to diagnose malaria and dengue 24 hours a day. There was no tropical disease protocol in 19 (45.3%) hospitals. Seven (16.7%) hospitals had =?10 attendances/day. Larger hospitals were more likely to have an infectious disease unit independent from Internal Medicine service, along with a tropical medicine unit, and an on-call infectious disease specialist and microbiologist. There are no statistically significant differences between larger and smaller hospitals in terms of their capacity to carry out appropri-ate diagnoses or treatments in 24 hours.
Conclusion: Care and treatment of emerging diseases are now a sizeable percentage of the consultations at an HES. Such units generally lack specific protocols, particularly for malaria. Urgent diagnostic testing for malaria is also needed.