Papers
The rise in emergency admissions—crisis or artefact? Temporal analysis of health services data
BMJ 1999; 319 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.319.7203.158 (Published 17 July 1999) Cite this as: BMJ 1999;319:158
- Kieran Morgan, director of public healtha,
- David Prothero, senior statisticiana,
- Stephen Frankel, professor of epidemiology and public health medicine (stephen.frankel@bris.ac.uk)b
- a Avon Health Authority, Bristol BS2 8EE
- b Department of Social Medicine, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 2PR
- Correspondence to: Stephen Frankel
- Accepted 18 February 1999
Paper p 155
It is a common view that emergency admissions are increasing at up to 5% per year in the United Kingdom,1 and that this unsustainable rise “threatens the future of the NHS.”2 The perceived rise in emergency admissions is invoked to explain those recurrent and well publicised crises that in turn support the view that there is a fundamental mismatch between demand and supply in health care,3 as the reported trend is held to represent a real and substantial increase in demand for hospital care.
Subjects, methods, and results
The data presented here reflect all emergency admissions in all medical and surgical specialties from 1989-90 to 1997-8 in an urban and rural population of 850 000 served by Avon Health Authority Three trends are described: …