Intended for healthcare professionals

  1. Research
  2. Causes and patterns of...
  3. Causes and patterns of readmissions in patients with common comorbidities: retrospective cohort study
CCBYNC Open access
Research

Causes and patterns of readmissions in patients with common comorbidities: retrospective cohort study

BMJ 2013; 347 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.f7171 (Published 16 December 2013) Cite this as: BMJ 2013;347:f7171

All rapid responses

Rapid responses are electronic comments to the editor. They enable our users to debate issues raised in articles published on bmj.com. A rapid response is first posted online. If you need the URL (web address) of an individual response, simply click on the response headline and copy the URL from the browser window. A proportion of responses will, after editing, be published online and in the print journal as letters, which are indexed in PubMed. Rapid responses are not indexed in PubMed and they are not journal articles. The BMJ reserves the right to remove responses which are being wilfully misrepresented as published articles or when it is brought to our attention that a response spreads misinformation.

From March 2022, the word limit for rapid responses will be 600 words not including references and author details. We will no longer post responses that exceed this limit.

The word limit for letters selected from posted responses remains 300 words.

Re: Causes and patterns of readmissions in patients with common comorbidities: retrospective cohort study

This is another useful contribution to the re-admission debate and has overlaps with some research which I recently published investigating those conditions which had shown the highest rate of increase in elderly (age 75+)admissions in England over the past 12 years (1). Ninety diagnoses/conditions were identified and somewhat unsurprisingly they were mostly linked to conditions with associated co-morbidity.

As has been observed by many others the care of particular groups of older patients is far more multi-factorial than current NHS (and health care in other Western countries) care seems to be delivering.

1. Jones R (2013) Trends in elderly diagnoses: links with multi-morbidity. British Journal of Healthcare Management 19(11): 553-558.

Competing interests: The author provides consultancy to NHS organisations.

21 December 2013
Rodney P Jones
Statistical Advisor
Healthcare Analysis & Forecasting
Camberley, Surrey
Back to top