[Hospital admisions and consultations in a dialysis population]

The hemodialysis (HD) population continues growing and aging, reason why they are required to adapt the human, economic and materials resources to be taken care of.

To analyze the distribution of the consultations and the times of admissions in the different Hospital services of which an peripheral arranged HD Center depends.

We analyzed all the consultations to the Hospital Urgencies Departments and Hospitable admissions of all the patients who received HD in the arranged Center Ponfedial, (sanitary area Ponferrada of 150,000 inhabitants) in period 01/12/02 to the 31/05/05.

We prospectively examined a population of 87 HD patients (71.0+/-12.5 years, 77.9 % male, 31.4% diabetics) time in HD 21.0+/-22.7 months. They were a total of 286 (9.5/month) consultations in the Service of Urgencies (2.31 consult/patient/year), 37.4% of them did not motivate admissions. The most frequent consultation (28,9%) was the complications of vascular access (70,9% of them required positioning a transitory catheter; 1.1 complication of catheter/months, 1 permanent catheter is placed/1.2 months and 1 fistulography/1.2 months), cardiac causes 10.3%, acute pulmonar edema: 9.3%, infectious: 8.4% and traumatologic: 8.4%. There were 179 admissions (5.9/month; 1.44 hospitalizations/patient/year; 4.0+/-14.2 days of admissions): cardiovascular cause: 37.4%, by vascular access: 18.4%, infectious disease: 17.0%, digestive: 6.7%, traumatologic: 3.9% and by other causes: 11.0%. The cardiovascular group takes 46.5% (60.8% of them by vascular peripheral disease) of the total of days of hospitalizations, infectious 16.7%, neoplasic 8.4% and vascular access 7.6%. The neoplasic causes were the greater average with 36.0+/-21.6 days of hospitalization, by amputations 23.0+/-38.1 days, by stroke 14.5+/-10.6 days, infected ulcers of lower extremities members 10.0+/-19.0, other vascular treatments 10.0+/-4.7, ischemic heart disease 8.5+/-20.3 and heart failure 7.5+/-5.2 days. Our prevalent population of 49.5 patients needed 3 to 7 hospitable beds, 0.33 temporal catheter, 1 tunneled permanent catheter and 1 fistulography per month.

The cardiovascular causes, the accesses and the infectious ones are the main causes of consultations, hospital admissions and time of hospitalizations.