Impact of COVID-19 situation on non COVID cardiological admissions

• Published in: European journal of preventive cardiology Vol. 30; no. Supplement_1
• Main Authors: Del Castillo-Carnevali, H, Alvarez, J, Joan, T O R R E S, Magnani, S, Cremer, D, Ruiz, V, Alamar, M, Moranta, M E, Folgado, P, Ripoll, T, Gamez, J M
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 24-05-2023
• ISSN: 2047-4873; 2047-4881
• DOI: 10.1093/eurjpc/zwad125.131

Abstract
Funding Acknowledgements
Type of funding sources: None.
Background
The COVID-19 outbreak led to a redistribution of resources in order to provide care to coronavirus patients, taking those resources from other areas such as cardiology, specially from ambulatory patients.
Moreover, the fear to the contagious disease, made people to avoid seeking hospital aid. This two factors may have had impact on hospital parameters such as length of stay, readmissions or mortality, with short and mid term effect.
Scope: To demonstrate that the factors exposed in the introduction had led to more complex admissions, higher mortality rates, more readmissions and longer stays.
Methods
we performed a descriptive study comparing hospital parameters from a secondary hospital in Spain using to different periods: a pre-COVID period (01/2019 to 02/2020) and a COVID period (03/2020-01/2022). Only non-COVID cardiological patients where analyzed. Data where extracted form the hospital database and benchmarking tool "Iasist".
Results
Despite the fact that %readmissions, length of stay (specially form patients awaiting surgery) and complications increased after the outbreak, there was not an increase in mortality . As additional finding, we observed a decrease in admissions complexity according to coding weight parameters.
Conclusions
Non COVID cardiological admissions have varied since the outbreak, some of those variations where expected such as increase in complications or readmissions, but there was no deleterious impact on mortality.