I have a researcher looking for stats on: number of patients going to Emerg. per year at Health Sciences North (HSN - the hospital in Sudbury), number of patients going to Emerg. per year in Ontario and/or Canada, number of Emerg. patients at HSN by triage level (CTAS 1-5, or urgent/non-urgent) and number of people with/without primary care providers in Sudbury.
It does not look like the CIHI DAD PUMFs can be used for the required data. Is there any other DLI data that might be useful here? Or are you CIHI contacts able to provide anything? For the last variable, I suspect that I should follow up with the Ontario Ministry of Health - unless anyone has another suggestion?
Answer
CIHI forwarded your inquiry to Decision Support Services (DSS). Our program area produces customized reports and data sets derived from the Discharge Abstract Database (DAD), the Hospital Morbidity Database (HMDB), and the National Ambulatory Care Reporting System(NACRS).
The following provides information about the statistics the researcher is interested in:
- Number of patients going to Emerg. per year at Health Sciences North (HSN - the hospital in Sudbury) -This information is available from the NACRS database, but please note that our current policy does not allow us to release hospital-specific information without prior written consent/authorization from the hospitals. Depending on the intended use of the data, the researcher may need to obtain authorization from HSN before we canprovide facility-specific counts.
- Number of patients going to Emerg. per year in Ontario and/or Canada - I would like to point you to an online resource that the researcher may find to be helpful. Please go to CIHI’s Quick Stats where you can find the latest ED stats (fiscal year 2012/13). Please note that these stats provide information on number of Emergency Department visits and not number of patients going to Emergency Departments. I should also note that although the NACRS database does not have national coverage of ED data, it does provide 100% coverage for the province of Ontario.
- Number of Emerg. patients at HSN by triage level (CTAS 1-5, or urgent/non-urgent) - Similar to the first question, although the information is available from our database we may not be able to release the information unless an authorization is obtained from HSN.
- Number of people with/without primary care providers in Sudbury. - Unfortunately, this information is not captured in our databases.
If the researcher would like to request the above information, please have the researcher complete and submit a “Data Inquiry Form” available from CIHI’s website . Our team will then follow up with the researcher regarding the detailed custom data request process.
