Where does the education dollar go and Emergency Room visits

From the annual budgets of a local school district. The average over the last three budget years. Expressed on a per-pupil basis.

It is interesting that the cost of fringe benefits are about 70% of the cost of salaries.

Emergency Room visits

Source

The image shown above has a great deal of information in it. The headers are "Primary Reason" for going to the Emergency Room and they are numbered 1-through-16 which is their rank-order of in terms of frequency. The number in parenthesis in the headers is the "Coding number" and not the number of times it occurred.

The horizontal axis is broken into age groups and the squiggle-line is the percentage of ER visits with that primary cause that results in a hospital admission.

The text in the paper informs us that some admissions (especially for older patients) are because there is nobody at home who can care for them. Vertigo is a good example. They need somebody to help toilet them and if there is nobody there, then they get admitted. A higher percentage of seniors get admitted for vertigo than younger people not because it is more severe but because they are less likely to have support at home and because falling is a higher probability event and the consequences of falling is more severe.

In general, there is a bit of a knee in the curve at age 50 where the likelihood of being hospitalized from an ER visit ramps up more rapidly than between 1-and-50 years of age.

From anecdotal information, constipation is the "high runner" for abdominal pain (the most common "primary reason" given by patients). Women are between 1.5X and 4.0X more likely to suffer from constipation than men.

Studies with more than 10,000 subjects are highlighted. Source

 Controllable factors that contribute to constipation include

• Inadequate water intake
• Inadequate fiber
• Inadequate moving around
• Resisting the urge to defecate when our body tells us it is time 

It is easy to see that the corporate office work-model contributed to the gender disparity. The first study listed (1.82:1 disparity) was in the mid-1960s when fewer women were in the paid workforce and more of the jobs involved physical movement. Later studies, like the Harari, NHIS study (3.77:1 disparity) were conduced in the mid-1990s when more women were working office jobs and sat at computer monitors or answered phone-calls all day long. Many women strongly dislike using public restrooms.

Sidenote: I stumbled across several peer-reviewed papers about "gender equity in healthcare". The authors were criticizing Emergency Room personnel because they were much less likely to give women opioid's for abdominal pain then men. Clearly, these were Gender Study majors rather than Healthcare professionals. Morphine and other opioids are strongly counter-indicated for constipation because they reduce gut motility, i.e. they paralyze the gut.

Opioids should not be administered before a diagnosis has been done because it can make the underlying issue worse or make diagnosis more difficult. 

Applesauce

Yesterday was an "applesauce" day. Sixteen quarts were canned and now sitting on shelves in the pantry.