Cum Laude for Robert Willemsen
Congratulations to Robert Willemsen who defended his PhD thesis on assessing chest pain in primary care on 23 March 2018 and was awarded the distinction cum laude.
He has studied the diagnostic problems of assessing chest pain in primary care. He has seen that the frequency of chest pain, presented to a general practitioner (GP) is high in the Netherlands.
He has also seen that a GP misses an infarction rarely but 70,000 patients are referred to a cardiologist immediately without eventually having an infarction or any severe disease. GP's feel comfortable with this level of over referral since few infarctions are missed this way.
A clinical decision rule (CDR) consisting of symptoms and a point of care test should lead to a reduction in referrals of patients without infarction of 40% in order to become cost neutral. Such CDRs including a point of care test were tested. However, no CDR performed better than the classic judgment by the GP without aid of a CDR.
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