BMJ  2005;330:266 (5 February), doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7486.266

Editorial

Identifying people at high risk of emergency hospital admission

Simply measuring previous hospital admission rates would be misleading

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

Predicting who is at high risk of becoming acutely ill and requiring emergency admission to hospital has become an important issue for the NHS in England. The Department of Health intends that people with complex long term conditions, who are frequent users of unplanned secondary care, will be identified.¹ After identification, a community matron or other health professional will care for these people by using case management, which has previously been defined as "a programme to intensively manage individual patients with uncontrolled or high cost conditions."² Community matrons could come from any branch of nursing, but district nurses are considered to be the group that will find it easiest to adapt to the role. This approach could reduce the number of avoidable emergency hospital admissions and help to meet the public services agreement target to reduce inpatient emergency bed days by 5% by March 2008. But how are people . . . [Full text of this article]

General Practice and Primary Care, Division of Community Based Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 9LX (jmm4y@clinmed.gla.ac.uk)

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Relevant Article

Follow up of people aged 65 and over with a history of emergency admissions: analysis of routine admission data

Martin Roland, Mark Dusheiko, Hugh Gravelle, and Stuart Parker
BMJ 2005 330: 289-292. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

This article has been cited by other articles:

• Lyon, D., Lancaster, G. A, Taylor, S., Dowrick, C., Chellaswamy, H. (2007). Predicting the likelihood of emergency admission to hospital of older people: development and validation of the Emergency Admission Risk Likelihood Index (EARLI). Fam Pract 24: 158-167 [Abstract] [Full text]  

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