Effect of Covid-19 on the Pattern of the Patients Referring to the Emergency Department of Shahid Sadoughi Hospital in Yazd in 2019-2021

Background: Covid-19 was first declared to be a pandemic in 2020. Once it occurred, hospitals as well as emergencies were encountered scores of challenges, including a large number of patients with a new contagious viral disease on the one hand, and the importance of continuing to provide adequate and complete services to non-covid patients who daily referred to the emergencies, on the other. Moreover, as a result of the emerging crisis, the pattern and rate of visits to the emergency department by non-covid patients underwent several alterations. Therefore, the current study was designed to evaluate the effect of covid-19 on the referral pattern of non-covid patients to the emergency department of Shahid Sadoughi Hospital in Yazd. Methods: This is an analytical cross-sectional investigation through which all the patients referred to the emergency department of Shahid Sadoughi Hospital in Yazd in April, August and November of 2018 and 2019 (before and after the outbreak of Covid-19) were examined. The variables of the study included age, gender, reason for the patient's visit, hospital service, type of discharge from the emergency room, status and time of the visit. The collected data were then entered into SPSS26 and analyzed using Chi-square and T-test. Results: The study included 11,587 patients aged 1 to 101 years, 58.4% men and 41.6% women. The number of emergency ward visits decreased significantly following the outbreak of the covid-19 disease. A statistically significant difference was identified between the frequency distribution of all the investigated variables at the desired times (P-value=0.002 for gender and P-value=0.0001 for other variables). Therefore, the number of the male patients within the age range of 20 to 65 years in infectious and pulmonary wards increased, but hospitalization in the orthopedics and internal neurology centers and referrals due to headache, abdominal pain, and nervous tension faced the greatest decrease. Among the types of discharge, hospitalization in and transfer to the ward lowered the most. Conclusion: Predicated on the current study, the emergence of covid-19 has triggered a significant reduction in the number of patients visiting the emergencies; the findings of this study can thus assist senior managers how to make policies as new epidemics arise in order to treat the patients and decrease mortality.