Letter to editor: Best estimations of the effects of alcohol on emergency department attendance

We thank Parkinson and colleagues for their recent interesting study1 which found that alcohol-related attendance at their ED to be 12%–15% with marked variation in attendance by time and demographics. We performed a similar retrospective study looking at a calendar year's worth of data (2013) from Poole Hospital Foundation Trust's ED. Collating all of the attendances that had been recorded as ‘related to alcohol’ by the discharging clinician, we analysed these records and their demographics. The estimates of cost were taken from the hospital's data and coding department. Of 60 908 attendances, we found that only 1.7% of all attendances were recorded as being due to alcohol. Data from the coding department estimated a cost of £160 000 and showed that these attendances took up 2735 hours of ED time and clinical care. There were 155 in-hospital admissions with a total length of stay of 397 bed-days. Extrapolating the figures...
Source: Emergency Medicine Journal - Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Tags: PostScript Source Type: research