Emergency Admissions Study (EASy)

Identification of emergency and urgent care system characteristics affecting avoidable unplanned admission rates.

Aim

To identify system factors explaining avoidable emergency admissions in different emergency and urgent care health systems.

Team

• Professor Alicia O’Cathain (PI)
• Professor Steve Goodacre
• Enid Hurst (PPI representative)
• Emma Knowles
• Dr Ravi Maheswaran
• Professor Jon Nicholl
• Janette Turner
• Tim Pearson
• Susan Proctor (Project Officer)

Funder

NIHR Health Services and Delivery Research Programme.

Funding: £262,784

Time period: 1 November 2011 for 2 years, 3 months.

Summary

Provision for some emergency hospital admissions is a necessary and important part of the National Health Service (NHS). However, there is a belief that not all emergency admissions are necessary and can result in hospital acquired infections, distress to patients and their families, difficulties for service providers trying to balance elective and emergency care, and unnecessary high cost intervention in a resource limited health service. As a consequence, reducing unnecessary admissions has been a focus of policy makers, commissioners and service providers for many years.

Our research will assess how characteristics of the emergency and urgent care system - its configuration, integration, and accessibility - affect avoidable emergency admissions, providing evidence based information that system managers can use to change modifiable system characteristics to avoid some emergency admissions. Specifically we will:

1. Calculate the ‘standardised avoidable emergency admission rate’ for each emergency and urgent care system in England.
2. Explore the relationship between this indicator and the rate of emergency admissions, and the Nuffield Trust indirectly standardised admission ratio.
3. Explain variation in ‘standardised avoidable emergency admission rates’ in different systems using routine data on population, health and system characteristics.
4. Undertake in-depth research in systems with high and low ‘standardised avoidable emergency admission rates’ to identify the more complex system factors which may be influencing variation.
5. Identify modifiable factors which affect avoidable emergency admissions to help policy makers, commissioners and service providers implement changes to reduce avoidable admissions.

For further information please contact Susan Proctor (Project Officer).