Publication type
Journal Article
Authors
Publication date
July 19, 2023
Summary:
Objectives: To examine whether there is an association between people who experienced disrupted access to healthcare during the covid-19 pandemic and risk of an avoidable hospital admission.
Design: Observational analysis using evidence from seven linked longitudinal cohort studies for England.
Setting: Studies linked to electronic health records from NHS Digital from 1 March 2020 to 25 August 2022. Data were accessed using the UK Longitudinal Linkage Collaboration trusted research environment.
Participants: Individual level records for 29 276 people.
Main outcome measures: Avoidable hospital admissions defined as emergency hospital admissions for ambulatory care sensitive and emergency urgent care sensitive conditions.
Results: 9742 participants (weighted percentage 35%, adjusted for sample structure of longitudinal cohorts) self-reported some form of disrupted access to healthcare during the covid-19 pandemic. People with disrupted access were at increased risk of any (odds ratio 1.80, 95% confidence interval 1.39 to 2.34), acute (2.01, 1.39 to 2.92), and chronic (1.80, 1.31 to 2.48) ambulatory care sensitive hospital admissions. For people who experienced disrupted access to appointments (eg, visiting their doctor or an outpatient department) and procedures (eg, surgery, cancer treatment), positive associations were found with measures of avoidable hospital admissions.
Conclusions: Evidence from linked individual level data shows that people whose access to healthcare was disrupted were more likely to have a potentially preventable hospital admission. The findings highlight the need to increase healthcare investment to tackle the short and long term implications of the pandemic, and to protect treatments and procedures during future pandemics.
Published in
BMJ
Volume
Volume: 382:e075133
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2023-075133
ISSN
9598138
Subjects
Notes
Open Access
This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt and build upon this work, for commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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