Currie C J, Morgan C L, Peters J R, Kerr M
Department of Medicine, University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff, UK.
Epilepsia. 1998 May;39(5):537-44. doi: 10.1111/j.1528-1157.1998.tb01417.x.
To describe the patterns of inpatient and outpatient hospital care for patients with epilepsy in our health district.
Routine hospital data for the health district of South Glamorgan (population 408,000) underwent record linkage to identify those records relating to the same patients and to flag those records for patients with epilepsy. This data was analyzed to determine inpatient and outpatient activity by specialty and compared with the nonepileptic population.
We identified 2.267 patients representing a prevalence of 0.56%. The average age was 46 years in both male and female patients. This group, which constituted 1.5% of the hospital population, was responsible for 2.8% of all admissions but, because of increased length of stay, utilized 7.3% of all bed days. The total cost of care for this group lies between these two extreme values and is dependent on case severity. The patterns of associated diagnoses differed considerably in three arbitrary age groups (0-18, 19-55, >55 years).
This study quantifies for the first time the level of demand that this subpopulation places on the service as a whole, and begins to illustrate that there may be evidence for cost containment by, for example, a reduction in multiple admissions. The demand for inpatient services is greater than we would have predicted.
描述我们健康区癫痫患者的住院和门诊医疗模式。
对南格拉摩根健康区（人口40.8万）的常规医院数据进行记录链接，以识别与同一患者相关的记录，并标记癫痫患者的记录。对这些数据进行分析，以确定各专科的住院和门诊活动情况，并与非癫痫人群进行比较。
我们识别出2267名患者，患病率为0.56%。男性和女性患者的平均年龄均为46岁。该群体占医院总人数的1.5%，占所有入院人数的2.8%，但由于住院时间延长，占用了所有床位天数的7.3%。该群体的护理总成本介于这两个极端值之间，取决于病例的严重程度。在三个任意年龄组（0 - 18岁、19 - 55岁、>55岁）中，相关诊断模式有很大差异。
本研究首次量化了这一亚群体对整个服务的需求水平，并开始表明可能有证据支持通过减少多次入院等方式控制成本。对住院服务的需求比我们预期的要大。
