All emergency admissions to hospital (directly age-standardised mortality rate per 100,000 population, persons). Comparison of crude admission rates between areas which may have different age structures would be inappropriate, because the age structure of the population can affect the number of admissions and thereby the crude admission rate. To overcome this problem, the common approach is to adjust or standardise the admission rates to take account of differences between the age structures of the populations. The directly age standardised admission rate is the rate of admissions that would occur in a standard population (in this case the European Standard Population) if that population were to experience the age-specific rates of the subject population (in this case individual Local Authority populations). The same standard population is used for males, females and persons. This means that rates can be compared across gender but also that rates for persons are standardised for age only and not for sex.
The emergency admission rate is an important measure of the effectiveness of preventative strategies, intermediate care (both admission prevention and post-acute rehabilitation), community care arrangements and hospital discharge arrangements for older people. As these arrangements must be jointly agreed between health and Social Services, it is an indicator of how well these agencies are working together. There is anecdotal evidence that pressure for early discharge, inadequate rehabilitation and recovery, poor discharge arrangements or inadequate community care and prevention arrangements lead to unnecessary emergency admissions.
Legacy unique identifier: P01060