Increasing diagnoses per patient admission at a specialist children’s hospital: A retrospective study

Stuart A Bowyer, John Booth, Daniel Key, Eleni Pissaridou, William A Bryant, Harry Hemingway and Neil J Sebire

PLOS ONE, 2025, vol. 20, issue 5, 1-11

Abstract: Objective: In adult practice there is recognition that average patient complexity is increasing, with a greater proportion of patients having multiple diagnoses or comorbidities. This study aims to examine whether there has been a change in number of recorded coexisting diagnoses per patient over a 24-year period for children attending as in-patients to a specialist children’s hospital in England. Methods: Following all in-patient admissions, patient episodes are allocated specific diagnosis codes (ICD-10) by a specialist clinical coding team according to standard NHS criteria and guidance. We examine the number of coexisting diagnoses allocated per patient admission over a 24-year period. Results: From a total of 278,579 overnight in-patient admissions during the study period (2000–2023) there were 1,023,276 ICD-10 patient diagnoses. The mean number of diagnoses per admission increased from 2.72 to 10.43 over the period (Kendall’s tau statistic of 0.93; p-value

Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0322997

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0322997

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