Increasing use of the emergency department in a Swiss hospital: observational study based on measures of the severity of cases

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Abstract
I analysed administrative data collected from 1993 to 1999 for consultations in the emergency department of the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois, the public general hospital serving 286 000 inhabitants in the Lausanne area. Over this period, the number of consultations increased by 7421 from 30 822 to 38 243. This was a mean annual increase of 1.5% between 1993 and 1996 and 5.9% between 1996 and 1999 while the resident population remained stable (it increased by only 0.5%).