Emergency Admissions: Age & Gender Profile (part 1)

Lessons from an undisclosed NHS Trust

Sometimes I set aside all fancy number crunching and produce something simple and satisfying that carries more weight than I had anticipated. Like a cheese and onion crusty roll with a pint of ale sort of thing. This morning I had the notion to ponder on the age and gender profile of every admission to the emergency department for the period Jan 2017 – Sep 2021 and produce something in a pleasant pastel. Well here it is. I’ve used the same age banding as the ONS use for vaccination counts and rates so we may get a feel of just who is coming in through the front door in the first instance.

People expect to see large numbers of very elderly people in the emergency department and this is partially true; that bump over on the far right represents 9.7% of all admissions. The bump that surprises people is the under 12y category, this representing 15.0% of all admissions. We have another bump for the 18 – 24y category representing 12.3% of all admissions. In fact, when we add up everyone under the age of 25 years we find this bunch of young folk taking up one third of all emergency department admissions (33.0%).

How many of these young things are likely to be vaccinated? Exactly. This is why emergency departments are always going to fill with folk who are less likely to be vaccinated with a product that was rolled out in age-prioritised fashion. In statistics we call this ‘bias’ and a decent analyst will attempt to account for this. Experts on camera, however, prefer to deceive the public because it is in their interests to do so.

Before I pour my cuppa one other thing to note is the pretty even split between males and females of more or less any age category. The largest discrepancy comes in the 80+ year category because women tend to outlive men. Male children under 12 years also have a rough time of it. C’est la vie!