Demand for HUS services continued to grow in 2019.
Physicians wrote nearly 330,200 referrals to HUS for preplanned non-urgent care, an increase of 4.7% on the previous year. Every day, HUS received 1300 elective referrals on average.
Patient care
In 2019, HUS recorded nearly 298,000 emergency clinic visits in specialist medical care, 19% more than in 2018. On average, there were 820 such visits every day. This was due particularly to the transfer of emergency clinic services at Haartman and Malmi Hospitals from the City of Helsinki to HUS at the beginning of 2019. Excluding the impact of the emergency clinic visits at Haartman and Malmi Hospitals, the number of emergency clinic visits decreased by about 2%.
This decrease can be explained at least in part by the fact that the transfer of children’s general practice emergency services from the City of Helsinki to HUS has changed the type of emergency clinic visits at the New Children’s Hospital so that specialist medical care emergency clinic visits have decreased, being replaced with health center emergency clinic visits.
Also, visits by the patients now transferred to Meilahti and Töölö Hospitals due to the transfer of emergency clinic services from Haartman and Malmi Hospitals to HUS used to be registered as separately billed emergency clinic visits. Now, of such visits only non-billable additional visits are registered.
More than half of patients on referral from health centers
About 57% of patients coming in for preplanned treatment at HUS came on a referral from a health center physician. About 33% came on a referral from a private physician, and about 10% on a referral from another hospital.
The number of patients sent by health centers decreased by 1.6%, while the number of patients sent by private physicians increased by 1.7%.
About 69% of the growth in elective referrals came from referrals from private physicians and private hospitals.