1. Is the use of emergency departments socially patterned?
- Author
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Fanny Le Querrec, Hélène Colineaux, Sandrine Charpentier, Thierry Lang, Jean-Christophe Gallart, Sébastien Lamy, Laure Pourcel, Olivier Azema, Michelle Kelly-Irving, Epidémiologie et analyses en santé publique : risques, maladies chroniques et handicaps (LEASP), Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM)-Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier (UT3), and Université Fédérale Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées-Université Fédérale Toulouse Midi-Pyrénées
- Subjects
Adult ,Male ,medicine.medical_specialty ,Health (social science) ,Adolescent ,Socioeconomic position ,Population ,Visit rate ,Ethnic group ,Young Adult ,03 medical and health sciences ,0302 clinical medicine ,Residence Characteristics ,Ethnicity ,medicine ,Humans ,030212 general & internal medicine ,Young adult ,education ,ComputingMilieux_MISCELLANEOUS ,Aged ,education.field_of_study ,business.industry ,musculoskeletal, neural, and ocular physiology ,Public health ,Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health ,030208 emergency & critical care medicine ,Health Status Disparities ,Emergency department ,Middle Aged ,United States ,Health states ,Socioeconomic Factors ,Female ,[SDV.SPEE]Life Sciences [q-bio]/Santé publique et épidémiologie ,France ,Emergency Service, Hospital ,business ,Demography - Abstract
To analyse the association between patients’ socioeconomic position (SEP) and the use of emergency departments (EDs). This population-based study included all visits to ED in 2012 by inhabitants of the French Midi-Pyrenees region, recorded by the Regional Emergency Departments Observatory. We compared ED visit rates and the proportion of non-severe visits according to the patients’ SEP as assessed by the European Deprivation Index. We analysed 496,388 visits. The annual ED visit rate increased with deprivation level: 165.9 [95% CI (164.8–166.9)] visits per 1000 inhabitants among the most advantaged group, compared to 321.9 [95% CI (320.3–323.5)] per 1000 among the most disadvantaged. However, the proportion of non-severe visits was about 14% of the visits, and this proportion did not differ according to SEP. Although the study shows a difference of ED visit rates, the probability of a visit being non-severe is not meaningfully different according to SEP. This supports the assumption that ED visit rate variations according to SEP are mainly explained by SEP-related differences in health states rather than SEP-related differences in health behaviours.
- Published
- 2018