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There are considerable misconceptions about emergency admissions. Many claim them to be predictable! Studies by HCAF have shown that the link between the weather and environment (pollution, viral & other infections) creates the opportunity for emergency admissions to show highly erratic trends over time.
Indeed the financial risk associated with emergency admissions is very high and is up to 3-times higher than due to chance variation alone. There are considerable implications to the longer-term bed requirements of hospitals, to commissioning activity and the issue of whether emergency admissions should be part of Practice Based Commissioning (PBC).
Under the 2009/10 short stay tarrif in England HCAF estimate that acute Trusts were making a profit margin of £300 per every zero day stay 'emergency admission' made via an assessment unit. This has been partially corrected in the 2010/11 tariff.
Refer to the 'Forecasting Demand' folder for studies relating to the evaluation of excess demand and the 'Hospital Beds' folder for issues around emergency admissions and bed requirements.
Emergency Admissions Series
British Journal of Healthcare Management (BJHCM)
Jones R (1996) Estimation of annual activity and the use of activity multipliers.
Health Informatics 2, 71-77
Jones R (1997) Admissions of difficulty. Health Service Journal, 107(5546), 28-31
Jones R (2009) Trends in emergency admissions. BJHCM, 15(4), 188-196
Jones R (2009) Cycles in emergency admissions. BJHCM, 15(5), 239-246
Jones R (2009) Emergency admissions and hospital beds. BJHCM, 15(6), 289-296
Jones R (2009) Emergency admissions and financial risk. BJHCM, 15(7), 344-350
Jones R (2010) Cyclic factors behind NHS deficits and surpluses BJHCM, 16(1), 48-50
Jones R (2010) Emergency preparedness. BJHCM, 16(2), 94-95
Jones R (2010) Unexpected, periodic, increase in medical inpatient care: Man-made or new disease? Medical Hypotheses, 74 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mehy.2010.01.011
Jones R (2010) Can time-related patterns in diagnosis for hospital admissions help identify common root causes for disease expression? Medical Hypotheses, 74 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mehy.2010.02.009
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Emergency Admissions