Data on each hospital discharge from publicly funded acute hospitals are collected by the hospital in-patient enquiry, HIPE, system which is administered by the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI. Clinical information on diagnosis and procedures is classified according to the international classification of diseases, 9th revision, clinical modification (ICD-9-CM) which is based on the World Health Organisations, WHO, 9th revision, international classification of diseases (ICD-9). The Central Statistics Office, CSO, compiles information on mortality derived from death registrations and uses ICD-9 to code cause of death.
The latest comprehensive annual data available from HIPE refers to the year 2001. Data for 2002 is nearing completion and will have close to full coverage by the end of June this year. Since there are many thousands of diagnoses and procedure codes in the ICD-9-CM classification it is possible to provide a wide range of morbidity analyses utilising the HIPE system. In March last year, the ESRI published a report on, Activity in Acute Public Hospitals in Ireland, 1990-1999, available in the Oireachtas Library, which summarises and reports on results over the 1990s.
Table 1 sets out figures on total numbers of day-case and in-patient discharges for major ICD-9-CM diagnosis chapters for the year 2001. It should be noted that patients admitted for treatment more than once during the year are counted separately in the statistics for each episode.
Table 1
Acute Hospital Discharges, In-Patients and Day-Cases, by ICD-9-CM Chapter, 2001