Causes of Readmission to Emergency Department; a Cross-sectional Study

Readmission is defined as a patient being admitted to the hospital again within a specific period, with or without previous surgery or medication program. The current study was designed with the purpose of assessing causes of readmission to emergency department.

This study is a retrospective cross-sectional study that was performed on patients who were readmitted to emergency department of Imam Hossein Hospital, Tehran, Iran, in 2019 using random sampling.

240 cases with the mean age of 50.47 ± 20.84 years were evaluated (59.6% male, 82.9% married). 60.4% of patients had a length of hospital stay less than one day, in 22.5% cases length of hospital stay was between 1 and 5 days, in 7.5% between it was 5 and 10 days, and in 9.6% cases it was more than 10 days. 61.7% had a history of special diseases, most of them (23%) had a history of heart disease and 38.3% had no history of disease. The most common causes of readmission were recurrence of disease (21.7%), persistence of pain (17.9%) and incorrect diagnosis (5.8%). There was no statistically significant relationship between age (p = 0.26), sex (p = 0.24), level of education (p = 0.26), drug addiction (p = 0.77), or time of discharge in the first visit (p = 0.55) and cause of readmission. However, there was a significant relationship between type of discharge (with physician’s opinion/against medical advice) in the first visit and the reason for readmission (p = 0.02) .

The Results showed that the most common causes of readmission were recurrence of disease, persistence of pain and incorrect diagnosis, respectively. Most of the patients were married men between the ages of 30 and 60 years without college education. There was a significant relationship between the type of discharge in the first visit and the cause of readmission.