EPIDEMIOLOGICAL STUDY OF HOSPITAL ADMISSION IN A COMMUNITY OF NEW IMMIGRANTS.

Abstract

There are many published studies which describe hospitalization from the viewpoint of the hospital or of a group of hospitals, as in the study of Forsyth and Logan (1960); or from the viewpoint of total populations, as published by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics (1960), in the Ministry of Health Report on Hospital In-Patient Enquiry for the two years 1956-57 (1961), and by Roth, Acker, Roemer, and Myers (1955) and Acker (1956) in Canada. Where smaller communities have been studied, the subject usually revolves upon the use of general practitioner services within single general practices, as in the studies of Hopkins (1956) and Fry (1959), or within a small number of practices, as in the studies of Logan (1954) and Logan and Cushion (1958). A hospitalization study of a complete community living in a small urban neighbourhood with well delineated geographical boundaries is uncommon. This paper describes hospital in-patient admissions in such a small urban neighbourhood for the four year period 1954 to 1957. Community Surveyed.?These people live in a government housing estate in a suburb of Jerusalem (Kiryat Yovel). The 520 flats were erected specially for new immigrants in 1950-51 and are all of standard design, consisting of one or two rooms, a kitchen-dining room, and a bathroom which also contains a lavatory. There are four to eight flats per building. The number of persons living in this community varied between 1,829 in 1954 and 2,073 in 1957 (Yekutiel and Berendt, 1954-57); altogether 7,723 person-years at risk during the four-year study period (Table I). The residents are new immigrants to Israel from thirty countries, situated in East and Central Europe (28 8 per cent.), North Africa (45 9 per cent.), and the Middle East (24*4 per cent.). Almost all the families immigrated between 1949 and 1951, and all are Jews. The population studied is a young one with a broad-based age structure, as seen in Table I. This is due to a preponderance of young persons (0-39 years) among the North Africans, in contrast to a large proportion of persons aged 60 years and above among the Europeans. The average family size of the