Exploring trends in demand for urgent care

Last February, I presented evidence to suggest that the trends in demand for urgent care were highly unusual, and may be due to a new type of infectious event (Jones, 2014a). Since that time, further research has revealed that this infectious-like event has occurred in an unprecedented four-in-a-row time series in 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2014, and is international in scope (Jones, 2015d, i). These events affect deaths, A&E attendances, medical admissions, bed occupancy, sickness absence and GP referral (Jones, 2014b–d; 2015c,d,i,m), and have a characteristic mix of increased death and medical admission for conditions which are sensitive to immune function (Jones, 2014a–c; 2015a–j, Jones and Goldeck, 2014). Analysis of a time series of deaths in England and Wales shows that since the 1950s these events typically occur twice per decade (Jones, 2015c, e), except for another cluster in the 1990s (1993, 1996, 1999, 2002) (Jones, 2015b, d).