Likelihood of admission to hospital from the emergency department is not universally associated with hospital bed occupancy at the time of admission

Abstract

Background: The decision to admit into the hospital from the emergency department (ED) is considered to be important and challenging. The aim was to assess whether previously published results suggesting an association between hospital bed occupancy and likelihood of hospital admission from the ED can be reproduced in a different study population. Methods: A retrospective cohort study of attendances at two Swedish EDs in 2015 was performed. Admission to hospital was assessed in relation to hospital bed occupancy together with other clinically relevant variables. Hospital bed occupancy was categorized and univariate and multivariate logistic regression were performed. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.