Inpatient, Day Case and Outpatient Activity

Multiple and All Emergency Admissions  

A steady rise in the number of emergency inpatient admissions has been a major source of pressure for the NHS over the past twenty years. Analysis contained within these pages has been developed to try to gain a better understanding of the underlying trends in emergency admissions and in particular multiple emergency admissions.

For the purpose of the analyses presented here, an emergency admission is defined as being a new continuous spell of care in hospital where the patient was admitted as an emergency. If a patient has more than one unplanned continuous spell of treatment in hospital in one year, this is defined as a multiple emergency admission for that patient. For more detailed information on how emergency admissions, multiple emergency admissions and bed days are defined and calculated, please see Interpretation notes .

Information on the number of emergency admissions and the number of patients with 1, 2 or 3+ emergency admissions within 1 year are shown for financial years 1999/00 to 2008/09 inclusive.  Data on occupied bed days for emergency admissions is also available up to 2008/09.  The data can be displayed for NHS Boards, Local Authorities or Community Health Partnerships.  To allow easier comparison rates per 100,000 population are also provided.  For further information on the layout of the data please see Information Layout .

Of particular interest are emergency admissions for the elderly population, specifically those aged 65 years and over. The Scottish Government has developed a HEAT target which relates to the number of occupied bed days for patients in this age group who were admitted as an emergency:

• By 2010/11, NHS Boards will reduce the emergency inpatient bed days for people aged 65 and over, by 10% compared with 2004/05.

The Detailed Information section below contains information on patients aged 65 year and over relating to this HEAT target.

Key Points

• For patients aged 65 years and over who have had 2 or more emergency admission spells in hospital, the rate per 100,000 population has increased slightly from 4,923 in 2007/08 to 5,092 in 2008/09, a slightly larger increase than the previous year (4,784 in 2006/07).
• For patients aged 65 years and over admitted as an emergency, occupied bed days appear to have levelled off in recent years, up to 2008/09. This data may be subject to slight changes in future releases.  For more information on data completeness please see here .
• The emergency admission rate per 100,000 population for patients aged under 25 years with 1 admission in a given year has increased steadily from 3,885 in 2003/04 to 4,170 in 2007/08. There has been a slight decrease in this rate to 4,091 in 2008/09.
• The rate per 100,000 population for children aged 0 to 4 years who have had 2 emergency admission spells in hospital has increased over the last 10 years from 947 in 1999/00 to 1,343 in 2008/09.

Detailed Information

Note: In order to provide more complete and up-to-date information on emergency admissions, multiple emergency admissions and bed days, ISD Scotland have revised the methodology used to calculate these data for this publication. Further details of these changes are available here.

Main contact: Secondary Care Team

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