Christensen EF, et al. – This study encompassed an assessment of the time trends in diagnoses and mortality among patients transported via emergency ambulance to the hospital. A rise was noted in the incidence of emergency ambulance service patients, the proportion of women, elderly, and non–specific diagnoses, over the 8–year period. A significant increase was reported in the level of comorbidity. In contrast, the 1–day and 30–day mortality decreased.

Methods

• The scheme of this research was a population-based cohort study with linkage of Danish national registries.
• It was performed at the North Denmark Region in 2007-2014.
• The recruitment included 148757 patients transported to hospital by ambulance after calling emergency services.
• The main outcome measures comprised of the analysis of the number of emergency ambulance service patients, distribution of their age, sex, hospital diagnoses, comorbidity, and 1-day and 30-day mortality, by calendar year.
• Poisson regression with robust variance estimation measured both age-and sex-adjusted relative risk of death and prevalence ratios for Charlson Comorbidity Index (CCI) to permit comparison by year, with 2007 as reference year.

Results

• Increased annual number of emergency ambulance service patients were found from 24.3 in 2007 to 40.2 in 2014 per 1000 inhabitants.
• The proportions of women raised from 43.1% to 46.4% and of patients aged 60+ years from 39.9% to 48.6%, respectively.
• It was seen that the proportion of injuries gradually declined, non-specific diagnoses increased, especially the last year.
• Proportion of patients with high comorbidity (CCI≥3) increased from 6.4% in 2007 to 9.4% in 2014, corresponding to an age- and sex-adjusted prevalence ratio of 1.27 (95% CI 1.16 to 1.39).
• The 1-day and 30 day mortality decreased from 2.40% to 1.21% and from 5.01% to 4.36%, respectively, from 2007 to 2014, corresponding to age-adjusted and sex-adjusted relative risk of 0.43 (95% CI 0.37 to 0.50) and 0.72 (95% CI 0.66 to 0.79), respectively.