Abstract

Background: Emergency Department (ED) re-attendances are one of the clinical quality indicators to measure the quality of care delivered in the UK. There isn’t much information on ED re-attendance rates and reasons responsible for it during the COVID-19 pandemic. We aim to establish the ED re-attendance rate during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods: Data for this single centre study was compiled from Symphony, the department’s electronic patient records. We chose the month of April 2020 for this study and subsequently followed up to 28 days for re-attendances. Only patients aged 18 years and older, presenting with COVID-19 symptoms who were discharged from ED were included (n=310). We also studied the hospital admission and mortality rates among the patients who had re-attended.

Results: Of the 310, 65 (21%) patients re-attended the ED more than once within 28 days and 27.6% of them belonged to the 41-50 age group. 30 (46.1%) patients were males and 35 (53.8%) were females. The majority (44.6%) of them were of white ethnicity. Among the re-attendees, most of them re-attended only once and within 7 days. Most of the re-attended patients were discharged and only 21 (32.3%) patients had a hospital admission. Of the admitted patients, 6 (28.5%) died in the hospital. Of the patients who died, 5 had tested positive for COVID-19.

Conclusions: ED re-attendances were significantly high during the COVID-19 pandemic compared to the national average from previous years.
 

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Funding