Likelihood of Death Within One Year Among a National Cohort of Hospital Inpatients in Scotland

Abstract

In an earlier study, we took a census of all inpatients in the 25 teaching and general hospitals of Scotland on a single date in 2010 and then linked the hospital patient records to records of death registration. We found that almost one-third of the patients in hospital on the census date died within 12 months.1 Could we assume that these findings would be replicated on any other day in Scotland's hospitals? To assess the robustness of the original findings of our census, we sought to test whether the results from the 2010 cohort of inpatients in Scotland would be repeated on a subsequent census date, three years later, in 2013.