TY - JOUR T1 - Does oxygen prescription on discharge lead to a decrease in re-admission rates in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)? JF - European Respiratory Journal JO - Eur Respir J VL - 38 IS - Suppl 55 SP - p691 AU - Rifat Rashid AU - Cathryn Steeley AU - Biman Chakraborty AU - Yasmin Khan AU - Shiva Bikmalla AU - Rahul Mukherjee Y1 - 2011/09/01 UR - http://erj.ersjournals.com/content/38/Suppl_55/p691.abstract N2 - Introduction: A previous survey highlighted a very high degree of physiologically unnecessary home oxygen use in COPD patients (Bhattacharya M, Potter A, Mukherjee R. Assessing for Long Term Oxygen Therapy (LTOT) in an English town. Am J Resp Crit Care Med 2008;177:A665). A common reason for the unnecessary use is that hospital physicians discharge COPD patients with home oxygen pending physiological assessment in the hope of preventing future hospital admissions, which we set out to examine.Methods: A retrospective review of COPD admissions and re-admissions of Birmingham East and North Primary Care Trust patients from April 2007- November 2010 based on International Classification of Diseases coding (J44); Welch's 2-sample t-test was applied to assess the significance of the difference in the admission rates of the 2 groups of COPD patients who receive and did not receive LTOT on discharge.Results: A total of 1942 patients were eligible of which 295 received LTOT on discharge. The mean annual admission rate in the LTOT group was 3.18 and 1.67 in the other (p<0.00000000001).View this table:LTOT prescription on dischargeConclusion: LTOT prescription on discharge is actually associated with a significant increase in re-admission to hospital of COPD patients. Further studies including controlling the admission rate for disease severity are necessary. Continuing to widen the provision of integrated multidisciplinary oxygen assessment services also seems to be reasonable. ER -