Introduction: We present a summary of the results of the hospital activities of the Internal Medicine (IM) Departments of the National Health Care System during the years 2005-2006.
Material and methods: The patients hospitalized in the IM departments of Spain during 2005 and 2006 were analyzed according to the data obtained from the minimum basic data set (MBDS), in which the administrative data were collected (age, gender, personal data) and clinical data (one principal diagnosis and up to 1 secondary diagnosis and 19 clinical procedures) for all the patients hospitalized in the public and private hospitals of Spain.
Results: During this period, there were 7,130.85 discharges in our country, 1,099.65 of these being from IM. A total of 53.6% of the patients were male, with mean age of 70.6 years, mean stay of 10 days (standard deviation [SD] 11.7) and 9.9% deaths. A total of 9.7% of the patients were admitted through the Emergency Department. Mean weight was 1.74 (SD 1.41) according to the American classification system and 1.1 (SD 0.73) according to the National Health System data. Respiratory failure diagnostic related group (DRG-541, 88 and 101) accounted for 14% of the discharges and heart failure (DRG 17, 544 and 87) accounted for 1.4% of all the episodes.
Conclusions: In Spain, the internal medicine doctors attended one out of every 6 hospitalized patients. Admissions for more than half of the patients admitted due to cardiorespiratory disorder were unscheduled and one out of every 10 died during their stay. These data illustrate the importance of this specialty in the context of health care of our country. (c) 2009 Elsevier España, S.L. All rights reserved.