Admission to acute care hospitals for adolescent substance abuse: a national descriptive analysis

摘要

BackgroundUse of alcohol and illicit drugs by adolescents remains a problem in the U.S. Case identification and early treatment can occur within a broad variety of healthcare and non-healthcare settings, including acute care hospitals. The objective of this study is to describe the extent and nature of adolescent admissions to the acute inpatient setting for substance abuse (SA). We use the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) 2000 Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project Kids Inpatient Database (HCUP-KID) which includes over 2.5 million admissions for youth age 20 and under to 2,784 hospitals in 27 states in the year 2000. Specifically, this analysis estimates national number of admissions, mean total charges, and mean lengths of stay for adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 admitted to an acute care hospital for the following diagnostic categories from the AHRQ's Clinical Classifications Software categories: "alcohol-related mental disorders" and "substance-related mental disorders". Frequency and percentage of total admissions were calculated for demographic variables of age, gender and income and for hospital characteristic variables of urban/rural designation and children's hospital designation.