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Arrival by ambulance explains variation in mortality by time of admission: retrospective study of admissions to hospital following emergency department attendance in England
  1. Laura Anselmi1,
  2. Rachel Meacock1,
  3. Søren Rud Kristensen1,
  4. Tim Doran2,
  5. Matt Sutton1
  1. 1Centre for Health Economics, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
  2. 2Department of Health Sciences, University of York, York, UK
  1. Correspondence to Dr Laura Anselmi, Centre for Health Economics, University of Manchester, Jean McFarlane building, Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PL, UK; laura.anselmi{at}manchester.ac.uk

Abstract

Background Studies finding higher mortality rates for patients admitted to hospital at weekends rely on routine administrative data to adjust for risk of death, but these data may not adequately capture severity of illness. We examined how rates of patient arrival at accident and emergency (A&E) departments by ambulance—a marker of illness severity—were associated with in-hospital mortality by day and time of attendance.

Methods Retrospective observational study of 3 027 946 admissions to 140 non-specialist hospital trusts in England between April 2013 and February 2014. Patient admissions were linked with A&E records containing mode of arrival and date and time of attendance. We classified arrival times by day of the week and daytime (07:00 to 18:59) versus night (19:00 to 06:59 the following day). We examined the association with in-hospital mortality within 30 days using multivariate logistic regression.

Results Over the week, 20.9% of daytime arrivals were in the highest risk quintile compared with 18.5% for night arrivals. Daytime arrivals on Sundays contained the highest proportion of patients in the highest risk quintile at 21.6%. Proportions of admitted patients brought in by ambulance were substantially higher at night and higher on Saturday (61.1%) and Sunday (60.1%) daytimes compared with other daytimes in the week (57.0%). Without adjusting for arrival by ambulance, risk-adjusted mortality for patients arriving at night was higher than for daytime attendances on Wednesday (0.16 percentage points). Compared with Wednesday daytime, risk-adjusted mortality was also higher on Thursday night (0.15 percentage points) and increased throughout the weekend from Saturday daytime (0.16 percentage points) to Sunday night (0.26 percentage points). After adjusting for arrival by ambulance, the raised mortality only reached statistical significance for patients arriving at A&E on Sunday daytime (0.17 percentage points).

Conclusion Using conventional risk-adjustment methods, there appears to be a higher risk of mortality following emergency admission to hospital at nights and at weekends. After accounting for mode of arrival at hospital, this pattern changes substantially, with no increased risk of mortality following admission at night or for any period of the weekend apart from Sunday daytime. This suggests that risk-adjustment based on inpatient administrative data does not adequately account for illness severity and that elevated mortality at weekends and at night reflects a higher proportion of more severely ill patients arriving by ambulance at these times.

  • Emergency department
  • Health services research
  • Mortality (standardized mortality ratios)
  • Standards of care

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

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Footnotes

  • Twitter Follow Rachel Meacock at @RachelMeacock, Søren Rud Kristensen at @soerenrk, Matt Sutton at @MattXSutton, Tim Doran at @narodmit

  • Contributors LA and MS designed the paper. LA, SRK and MS extracted the data and LA performed the analysis. LA and MS wrote the manuscript. RM, SRK and TD edited the manuscript. LA is the guarantor of this article.

  • Funding This research was funded by the National Institute for Health Research Health Services and Delivery Research (NIHR HS&DR) programme (project number 12/128/48).

  • Disclaimer The views and opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the HS&DR programme, NIHR, NHS or the Department of Health.

  • Competing interests None declared.

  • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

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