Edinburgh Napier University

  The number of children admitted to Scottish hospitals continues to rise, and this is due to cases admitted and discharged on the same day (“zero day admissions”). We do not currently know how best to “slow the flow” of children admitted to Scottish hospitals. Our research is an important first step towards filling this gap in our knowledge. There are two parts to our study. First, we will join up routinely collected records from family doctors, the out-of-hours service (OOH), accident and emergency and hospital admissions. Finding out how children move between services before they are admitted to hospital will help us to identify the points along the journey where we can potentially reduce zero day admissions in the future. In the second part of the study we will work with parents, patients and NHS staff to prioritise which points along the journey we tackle first as part of a subsequent project. This study will give us the evidence to start to develop child- and parent-focussed interventions to reduce the number of zero day admissions across Scotland.