[Appropriateness of the admissions and stays in an internal medicine department of a secondary hospital using the current version of the AEP ( Appropriateness Evaluation Protocol)].

AIMS

To Study the inappropriateness of the admissions and stays in an Internal Medicine Department using the concurrent version of the AEP (Appropriateness Evaluation Protocol).

METHOD

Aplication of the concurrent version of the AEP to all the patients internated in an Internal Medicine Department. 257 RESULTS: 59 patients and 485 stays fulfilled the inclusion criteria. A 15.3/ of the admissions and a 33/ of the stays did not acomplish the criteria of appropriateness of the AEP. The most frequent cause of innappropriate admision was to avoid the delay of the ambulatory studies. The most common cause of innappropriate stay was the wait for results of complementary tests and consultancy between different specialities.

CONCLUSIONS

Using the concurrent version of the AEP allows to obtain information about the overuse of the hospitalization resources in an easy and rapid way. The results obtained in our study are similar to other made in Spain using the retrospective version of the AEP.