What can routine health data tell us about the need for unplanned emergency department and hospital care over winter?

There are high pressures on NHS hospitals over winter periods particularly with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In this project we will report how recent winter hospital admissions have varied across a whole population in Lothian by the patterns of peoples’ health conditions, frailty, socioeconomic deprivation and previous NHS contacts. We will see if simple tools already available to clinicians could predict which people are more likely to need hospital care over winter, including for COVID and other winter viruses like influenza. This could help to better target preventive care. The NHS is increasingly treating people at home using ‘virtual wards’, managed remotely by hospital teams. We will use Emergency Department data to identify how many recent winter attendances may have been suitable for care at home. Through this project, we aim to show how routinely collected health data could coordinate smarter responses to winter hospital pressures in the future.