Hospitals provide a range of services for people suffering from chronic diseases. In some cases, frequent but short visits to hospitals are required for treatment and monitoring of the disease beyond what is available from GPs. For others, an extended stay in hospital may be needed to provide relief from pain, palliative care, or for a surgical procedure and subsequent recovery.
Two measures are used here to gauge the impact of chronic diseases on hospital services:
- number of hospital admissions
- average length of stay in hospital.
In 2004-05 there were 7 million hospital admissions (referred to as separations for statistical purposes) in Australia, with 1.5 million (21.8%) of these being for the 12 chronic diseases covered in this web site. The single greatest reason for hospital admission was for 'care involving dialysis', an indicator for chronic kidney disease (CKD), which accounted for nearly 700,000 admissions (11.6% of all admissions). Other chronic diseases causing more than 100,000 admissions were coronary heart disease (CHD) and oral diseases (Figure 1).
Figure1: Hospital separations for chronic diseases, 2004-05
Source: AIHW National Hospital Morbidity Database
While chronic kidney disease does not affect as many people as CHD, it causes more episodes of hospital care because people with end-stage kidney disease require frequent dialysis treatments, usually three times per week, and most of these treatments are carried out in hospitals.
On the other hand, the average length of stay in hospital for chronic kidney disease (measured as an admission for 'care involving dialysis') was the shortest, at 1.0 days, of the 12 chronic diseases covered here (Figure 2). This is because 'care involving dialysis' is usually a 'same day procedure', with the patient being admitted and discharged on the same day.
Likewise admissions for oral diseases, ranked third in terms of number of separations, were relatively short, averaging 1.3 days, as most of these are for dental procedures which usually do not require a long post-operative recovery period. At the other end of the scale, stroke, colorectal cancer, lung cancer and COPD each had average length of stays of more than 7 days.
Figure 2: Average length of stay in hospital for chronic diseases, 2004-05
Source: AIHW National Hospital Morbidity Database.
Notes
- Definitions of separation, procedure, average length of stay and other terms
- The International Classification of Diseases 10th Revision, 3rd edition was used for disease coding.
- For other useful information on hospital statistics see Australian hospital statistics 2004-05 (AIHW) and Interactive national hospital morbidity data (data cubes).