BMJ 1999;319:1201 ( 30 October )

Letters

Trends in emergency admissions

    Shop floor experience suggests a rise
    Rise has been real in Glasgow

Shop floor experience suggests a rise

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR---Morgan et al report that they find little evidence for a rise in emergency admissions from NHS data returns.1 Their conclusion is that much of the increase in admissions is due to internal transfer between consultants generating multiple finished consultant episodes for an individual patient's admission. My memory suggests that this was a prediction raised in letters to the BMJ when the finished consulting episode first became a recognised measure of hospital activity.

In accident and emergency our level of information technology is often more basic and our workload is dependent on the number of people passing through the department. I have simple number data for the accident and emergency departments that I have worked in during the period in question (figure). In two departments there has been an 85% increase in the number of patients admitted. The percentage of patients admitted from the total seen in the . . . [Full text of this article]
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Relevant Article

The rise in emergency admissions---crisis or artefact? Temporal analysis of health services data
Kieran Morgan, David Prothero, and Stephen Frankel
BMJ 1999 319: 158-159. [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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