The demand for hospital services for patients with epilepsy

To describe the patterns of inpatient and outpatient hospital care for patients with epilepsy in our health district.

Routine hospital data for the health district of South Glamorgan (population 408,000) underwent record linkage to identify those records relating to the same patients and to flag those records for patients with epilepsy. This data was analyzed to determine inpatient and outpatient activity by specialty and compared with the nonepileptic population.

We identified 2.267 patients representing a prevalence of 0.56%. The average age was 46 years in both male and female patients. This group, which constituted 1.5% of the hospital population, was responsible for 2.8% of all admissions but, because of increased length of stay, utilized 7.3% of all bed days. The total cost of care for this group lies between these two extreme values and is dependent on case severity. The patterns of associated diagnoses differed considerably in three arbitrary age groups (0-18, 19-55, >55 years).

This study quantifies for the first time the level of demand that this subpopulation places on the service as a whole, and begins to illustrate that there may be evidence for cost containment by, for example, a reduction in multiple admissions. The demand for inpatient services is greater than we would have predicted.