Weekly Trends In ED Admissions: Retention & Constipation

Lessons from an undisclosed NHS Trust

Yesterday I published a sizeable newsletter revealing 10 positive admission trends that require explanation. Over in my public facebook group I used constipation to illustrate the issue of confusing reason for admission with incidence of diagnostic. Constipation is not necessarily why folk are going to A&E but those going to A&E with more urgent issues are invariably being noted as constipated, this being the 45th most popular diagnosis at 1,450 mentions (0.5% of cases). A group member spotted ‘retention of urine’ in 34th place (0.7% of cases) in the top 40 listing of 18 – 99y non-COVID vaccinated admissions and an interesting thread ensued.

This morning I crunched incidence of constipation and retention of urine for all 18 – 99y non-COVID admissions and plotted this out. As you can see there is a positive and persistent trend over the period Jan – Sep 2021. Generalised linear modelling (GLM) confirmed the trend to be statistically significant (p=0.003), offering a mean rate of 0.34 ca…