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The purpose of this article is to analyse the correlation of air quality data with the number of emergency medical interventions and the number of patient visits to emergency clinic of the Integrated Emergency Hospital Admission (Croatian acronym: OHBP).
The analysis was conducted on data regarding Slavonski Brod (Croatia) from 1 January to 31 August 2016, obtained from:
(1) System eHitna – emergency medical services interventions
(2) Patients’ visit to OHBP-General Hospital Slavonski Brod
(3) Environmental Protection Agency data regarding air quality for PM2.5, PM10 and H2S per day.
The number of interventions ranged from 103 to 260 (M = 151), and the number of patients from 90 to 250 per day (M = 133). Overall the number of interventions was 37,482, and overall number of patients 32,757. The values of PM2.5 ranged from 1.73 to 500.11 µg/m3 (M = 18.70), values of PM10 ranged from 3.17 to 520.21 µg/m3 (M = 25.55), and values of H2S ranged from 0.62 to 12.43 µg/m3 (M = 1.49). The values of PM2.5, PM10 and H2S have been analysed also depending on the limit values (25 µg/m3 for PM2.5, 50 µg/m3 for PM10 and 5 µg/m3 for H2S).
The values were within the limit values for PM2.5 in 64% of days, in 80% of days for PM10 and in 93% of days for H2S.
There was a statistically significant weak correlation (rs = 0.333, p < 0.05) between PM2.5 and the number of patients per day, weak correlation (rs = 0.334, p < 0.05) between PM10 and the number of patients per day and a weak correlation (rs = 0.171, p < 0.05) between H2S and the number of patients per day.
There was a statistically significant difference in the number of patients who were provided with medical assistance in the day depending on the values of PM2.5 (p < 0.001) and PM10 (p < 0.001), while for H2S the significance was borderline (p = 0.051).
air pollution, particulate matter, urgent intervention
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