Changes in children's hospital use

This article examines changes in hospital separations of children aged 1 to 14 between 1986/87 and 1996/97. It focuses on four common causes of childhood hospitalization: asthma, chronic disease of tonsils and adenoids, fractures, and acute appendicitis.

Hospital separation data are from the Hospital Morbidity File, from Statistics Canada for fiscal year 1986/87, and from the Canadian Institute for Health Information for fiscal year 1996/97.

Diagnoses were coded to the International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision and surgical procedures were coded to the Canadian Classification of Diagnostic, Therapeutic, and Surgical Procedures. Population estimates for 1986 and 1996 were used to calculate hospital separation rates and surgical rates.

In 1986/87, there were 355,000 hospital separations of children aged 1 to 14; by 1996/97, the number of separations had fallen to just over 206,000. The hospital separation rate was 37.0 per 1,000 children in 1996/97, down from 69.7 ten years earlier. The average length of stay fell from 4.5 days to 3.8. The total annual number of days Canadian children stayed in hospital dropped from over 1.6 million to 788,700.