Health network to improve elderly patients' flow in emergency department.

Background: The French population has been growing older these past decades. The French Regional Health Organization System authorizes the creation of health networks in order to improve healthcare. We have developed since 2002 in our Tertiary Hospital Cochin, a health network inside Paris and its suburbs for the elderly to improve their flow from the emergency department. Our study, based on this organization, analyses the outcome of such a system.

Methods: From January 2002 to December 2002, we conducted a monocentric retrospective study from the emergency department including all polypathological elderly patients (older than 75 years) admitted for a medical purpose. We classified them according to triage level at arrival, their duration of stay in the emergency department and in the tertiary hospital/geriatric network and their in-hospital mortality.

Results: Elderly patients represented 12% of our recruitment of an overall number of 42 700 patients in 2002. Six hundred and ninety-nine (24.2%) patients needed admission in a geriatric field; 42.8% were hospitalized in our tertiary hospital and 57.2% in the geriatric network. The mean age was 86.5+/-6 years in the two groups. The triage scale shows that most elderly people needed rapid care in the emergency department. Our mean duration of stay in the emergency department was 11 h 30 min. No significant difference was observed in the two groups for the in-hospital duration of stay. Mortality rate was 10.2% with a significant difference in the two groups.

Conclusion: We observed a decreasing number of elderly persons' admission in our tertiary hospital, allowing a specific activity in the referred medical units. Our contract with the geriatric hospital in the network favoured elderly patients' flow from the emergency department. The geriatric network hospitals could refer back any patient to the emergency department for emergent events.