While many drug overdose and accidental poisoning patients are treated in the emergency room and released, a significant number of these patients are admitted to the hospital and can stay as long as 7 to 10 days. Accidental poisoning and drug overdose are significant problems in the United States and many other developed countries. In the U.S., many accidental poisonings occur in the home and are handled through consultation with Poison Control Centers. Several Poison Control Centers report approximately 20 percent of the calls they receive actually result in a hospital visit. In the case of drug or narcotic overdose, the percentage of subsequent hospital visits is much higher.
Many patients recover quickly and are hospitalized less than one day.
If patients do not improve immediately, however, they are taken from the emergency room and admitted to the hospital in a ward or intensive care unit. A private research firm, hired by HemoCleanse, conducted a study to determine the number of patient days in hospitals due to serious overdose and found that a significant percentage of those patients are hospitalized for two to four days. The research firm's database consisted of 1,455 hospitals and 10 million patient records. The top eight diagnosis codes in terms of frequency were identified, and all patients with this first-listed code were studied. All patients with a hospital stay of less than 11 days were included, assuming longer stays involved unrelated complications.