Emergency Room Visits for Those 65 and Older

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics released a new issue brief that tracks ER visits in 2009-2010 for those who are 65 and older. Drs. Albert & Ashman and Linda F. McCaig wrote the October 2013 data brief, Emergency Department Visits by Persons Aged 65 and Over: United States, 2009–2010. According to the key findings:

In 2009–2010, a total of 19.6 million emergency department (ED) visits in the United States were made by persons aged 65 and over. The visit rate for this age group was 511 per 1,000 persons and increased with age. ..The percentage of ED visits made by nursing home residents, patients arriving by ambulance, and patients admitted to the hospital increased with age…Twenty-nine percent of ED visits by persons aged 65 and over were related to injury, and the percentage was higher among those aged 85 and over than among those aged 65–74 or 75–84…The percentage of ED visits caused by falls increased with age

I thought this point regarding the correlation between ER visits due to injuries quite interesting. During the time of the study, almost 30% of the ER visits for those 65 and older were connected to injury and for those 85 and older, it was slightly over 1/3. Although you might think that falls accounted for a large percentage of the visits, the study results showed that accidental falls made up a little more than 13%  of the visits for those 65 and over.  Older patients had a higher incidence of falls:  20% for those 85 and over compared to slightly over 10% for those 65–74.