Why do children present to emergency departments? Exploring motivators and measures of presentation appropriateness for children presenting to a paediatric emergency department.

We caution that many strategies attempting to 'solve' the issue of increasing ED attendances by paediatric patients have been driven by opinion, and a better understanding of the motivators that drive this behaviour is needed. We believe the solution to increasing utilisation of EDs by children must be a balanced approach that addresses community expectations and appropriately resources EDs.