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Potentially avoidable hospitalisations

What is a potentially avoidable hospitalisation?

A potentially avoidable hospitalisation is a circumstance where a person presents to hospital with a concern that should not have occured. If they received proper treatment they would not have needed to attend hospital.

This is more common in people with intellectual disability as their health care needs are often unmet. Appropriate health care, and health action can lead to a decrease in potentialy avoidable hospitalisations.

This can even lead to death in some cases

How will we test if we decrease avoidable hospitalisations?

We will collect the following information and compare it 1 year before, and 1 year post intervention.

Potentially avoidable clinical indicators

A list of potentially avoidable clinical indicators was developed by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare in 2019. We will determine the number of potentially avoidable indicators that occured before and after the intervention. 

Queensland health data

We will gain consent to access Queensland health data that will include hospitalisations and emergency department visits. This will help us determine how many ED visits occured pre and post intervention. 

Non-impactable hospital admissions

We will also cross-reference with a list of non-impactable hospital admissions from the Health Quality and Safety Commission (NZ). This will ensure we have compared across all possible diagnosis/presentations.