[Current census rates in inpatients hospitalized in the Hospital de Poniente in Almería [Spain]]

To study the current census rate of patients admitted to an internal medicine service.

We studied all patients admitted to the internal medicine service from January 1 to August 31, 2000 whose addresses were registered in four local authorities of our hospital district. We made exhaustive searches to ascertain whether these patients were included in the register in September 2000.

We analyzed 1,095 admissions from a total of 1,759 up to August 31, 2000. Twenty-four percent corresponded to patients who were not registered. Fifty-eight percent of those not registered were aged more than 70 years. Twenty-seven percent of patients aged less than 40 years, most of whom were immigrants, were also unregistered.

Twenty-four percent of the admissions to the internal medicine service that were studied corresponded to patients who were not registered with their respective local authorities. A possible explanation is the large immigrant population and the lack of registration among the elderly.