Uncommon Ways to End Up in the ER.
The Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) is Britain’s national statistical data warehouse. Overall, with lots of coding and numbers indicating who was treated where for what, around all the NHS hospitals around England; it’s pretty dry and boring. But, as The Independent discovered, if you do a little digging around the numbers, you’ll find out that people do the strangest things.
Take for example the gentleman suffering from constipation, who when advised by someone (not a health professional) to take a boiled egg, literally took the boiled egg but not by mouth. Needless to say, when he awkwardly walked into the Emergency Room and told his tale, the health professionals remained professional and refrained from cracking a smile (at least in front of the patient).
Of course, constipation is not a laughing matter. According to the HES, it accounted for three quarters (75 per cent) of emergency hospital admissions in 2006-07.
The HES coding for constipation is K59.0, but the gentleman and his boiled egg ended up with a subheading of W44 – “foreign body entering through eye or other natural orifice”. This, it turns out, is a fairly commonly used code, with 5,048 children and 5,334 adults suffered this fate (not the boiled egg, just the foreign body) in 2007-08.
I’ll never look at statistics the same again.
Also during this same period 1,243 people needed hospital treatment after falling out a tree. While most of them were boys under the age of 15, there is also quite a few over the age of 75. Guess you’re never too old to climb a tree or to fall out of it.
Although, according to the HES, it can be just as dangerous as going to bed. Seems that more than a 1,000 people between the ages of 15 and 60 fall out of bed with such a force that they needed hospital treatment.
But wait, there’s more…
(image from sxc.hu)
Hi. Interesting article but with an error in interpretation of HES data here: “According to the HES, it accounted for three quarters (75 per cent) of emergency hospital admissions in 2006-07.”. Figures for primary diagnosis K59.0 for 2006/2007 in fact suggest that there were 457 first attendances with this code – 0.0013% (not 75%) of total attendances that year (http://www.hesonline.nhs.uk/Ease/servlet/ContentServer?siteID=1937&categoryID=896)