FRIDAY, Jan. 21, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- A delay of five or more hours to admission from the emergency department is associated with increased all-cause 30-day mortality, according to a study published online Jan. 19 in the Emergency Medicine Journal.
Simon Jones, Ph.D., from the New York University School of Medicine in New York City, and colleagues assessed and quantified the increased risk for death resulting from delays to inpatient admission from emergency departments. Data were obtained for patients admitted from every major emergency department in England between April 2016 and March 2018; during this period, 26,738,514 people attended an emergency department, with 7,472,480 patients admitted. The dataset constituted 5,429,891 individual patients.
The researchers reported 433,962 deaths within 30 days, with an overall crude 30-day mortality rate of 8.71 percent. From five hours after time of arrival at the emergency department up to 12 hours, there was a statistically significant linear increase in mortality. The greatest change in the 30-day standardized mortality ratio was an increase of 8 percent, which occurred among those who waited for more than six to eight hours in the emergency department from time of arrival; for every 82 patients delayed more than six to eight hours, one extra death occurred.
"This study demonstrates a time-associated linear increase in all-cause 30-day mortality for patients who remain in the emergency department for more than five hours from their time of arrival," the authors write. "This study confirms that health care policy makers should continue to mandate timely admission from the emergency department in order to protect patients from hospital-associated harm."
Several authors are employed by Methods Analytics.
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