Portugal’s authorities are so focused on cutting back demand for public healthcare that they have gone beyond the perennial appeals for everyone to get vaccinated against the latest strain of flu. They are now looking at what causes people to seek out hospital treatment in the first place – and concluded that so much of this is perfectly avoidable (if only people would stop doing things).
A new report by INSA (the public health institute Dr Ricardo Jorge) has found that in 2023 225,000 A&E ‘episodes’ were prompted by domestic or leisure activities. This rounds out at around 25 episodes per hour – of which 90 resulted in death, and 12,600 required hospital internment.
The report EVITA (AVOID) 2023 shows that 50.8% of accidents occurred in the home followed by 19.7% occurring in schools/ institutional areas/ public spaces. Of the accidents at home and in a leisure setting, the vast majority (68.8%) were listed as ‘falls’. The Algarve was the area with most home/ leisure accidents (34,574), followed by the western area of the country (19,041), Viseu Dão-Lafões health district (18,689) and the Coimbra region (15, 379). The months of May and August appear to have been the worst months for accidents; December, January and February seeing a lesser number of A&E visits (although these months are generally when A&E departments are flooded with flu victims, and people suffering from respiratory complaints).
The report also highlights days and times when A&E visits for domestic/ leisure accidents reach a peak: they are Saturdays and Mondays, around 10am, 3pm and 4pm – suggesting that men are the most likely to suffer accidents in the home, or in a leisure setting (particularly if they are in their 50s).
INSA also focuses on what people were doing when they had their accidents: 13.3% were ‘at leisure’, 9.8% in a domestic setting, 4.8% exercising, 2.1% in an ‘educative’ situation and 1.3% doing DIY.
As for types of injury, these tend to be ‘contusions/ hematomas’ (56.5%), open wounds (19.5%), concussion (8.5%) and abrasions (1.5%). The ‘product/ object’ involved in the accident was generally ‘the ground’ (34.2%), followed by ‘animal, plant, person’ (12.5%). In this last scenario, insects were responsible for almost half of the accidents.
The benefit of a report like this is that it can serve to warn people against doing certain things in which they may end up becoming injured – but this is forgetting that sedentarianism (although positive in terms of A&E admissions in the immediate/ short-term) is actually one of the major reasons that people these days are so unhealthy and prone to chronic diseases.
Source material: Correio da Manhã report on INSA’s EVITA 2023
