2315 Understanding seasonal demand for emergency care: aggregating routine data from regional emergency departments and acute hospital admissions

Conclusion After controlling for key variables, results indicated that ED outcomes showed more seasonal and regional variation than APC outcomes (figure 1). However, there were no clear systematic effects of winter across all sites for any outcome. Findings suggest that seasonal pressures on emergency care are complex and not due simply to increases in treatments or procedures, or to increased avoidable usage. Although seasonal virus diagnoses were controlled for, absolute numbers of these cases were too small to have fully accounted for seasonal pressure. Hospitals may already be accounting well for increased seasonal demand, moderating any observed effect of season. Ongoing work aims to establish more complex combinations of factors e.g., trends in demographics which may help to clarify findings. Abstract 2315 Figure 1Example aggregated outcomes from ECDS and APC analyses. Estimates show the adjusted effect of winter (Oct-March)
Source: Emergency Medicine Journal - Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Tags: RCEM Moderated Source Type: research