IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v25y1987i7p825-831.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Heavy users of an emergency department--A two year follow-up study

Author

Listed:
  • Andrén, Kjerstin Genell
  • Rosenqvist, Urban

Abstract

Persons who repeatedly turn to emergency departments (ED) for medical services often have an unfavorable social situation. Very little is known about how their situation and utilization of ED services change with time. In the present study, 232 persons who had made 4+ visits to an ED during the previous year were followed for two years. In the first year 31% and in the second 19% of the original group remained heavy users of the ED. Patients diagnosed as having bronchial asthma remained heavy ED users to a greater extent than others. The mortality in the whole group was high, the standardized mortality rate (SMR) was 590% for the men and 740% for the women during the first follow-up year and 380% respectively 350% during the second. A sub-sample of the patients was interviewed both in the beginning and at the end of the study period with regard to psycho-social factors. The follow-up analysis showed that number of previous visits, contact with psychiatric care, living alone and perceived loneliness were predictive factors for continued ED use. Twenty-two percent of the variation in ED use could be accounted for by changes in the social network over time. The present study supports the hypothesis that the quality of the social network is related to the use of medical services, here expressed in ED use. The findings raise the question of how to handle the variety of psycho-social problems found among these ED users.

Suggested Citation

  • Andrén, Kjerstin Genell & Rosenqvist, Urban, 1987. "Heavy users of an emergency department--A two year follow-up study," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 25(7), pages 825-831, January.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:25:y:1987:i:7:p:825-831
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0277-9536(87)90040-2
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lia Gentil & Guy Grenier & Helen-Maria Vasiliadis & Christophe Huỳnh & Marie-Josée Fleury, 2021. "Predictors of Recurrent High Emergency Department Use among Patients with Mental Disorders," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 18(9), pages 1-17, April.
    2. Laurence Klenk & Christina von Rütte & Jonathan F Henssler & Thomas C Sauter & Wolf E Hautz & Aristomenis K Exadaktylos & Martin Müller, 2019. "Resource consumption of multi-substance users in the emergency room: A neglected patient group," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(9), pages 1-15, September.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:25:y:1987:i:7:p:825-831. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.