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. 2021 Jan 19;11(1):1767.
doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-81527-7.

English hospital episode data analysis (1998-2018) reveal that the rise in dog bite hospital admissions is driven by adult cases

John S P Tulloch  1   2   3 , Sara C Owczarczak-Garstecka  4   5   6 , Kate M Fleming  7 , Roberto Vivancos  8   9 , Carri Westgarth  4
Affiliations

English hospital episode data analysis (1998-2018) reveal that the rise in dog bite hospital admissions is driven by adult cases

John S P Tulloch et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

Dog bites are a global health issue that can lead to severe health outcomes. This study aims to describe the incidence and sociodemographics of patients admitted to English National Health Service (NHS) hospitals for dog bites (1998-2018), and to estimate their annual direct health care costs. An analysis of patient level data utilising hospital episode statistics for NHS England, including: temporal trends in annual incidence of admission, Poisson models of the sociodemographic characteristics of admitted patients, and direct health care cost estimates. The incidence of dog bite admissions rose from 6.34 (95%CI 6.12-6.56) in 1998 to 14.99 (95%CI 14.67-15.31) admissions per 100,000 population in 2018, with large geographic variation. The increase was driven by a tripling of incidence in adults. Males had the highest rates of admission in childhood. Females had two peaks in admission, childhood and 35-64 years old. Two percent (2.05%, 95%CI 0.93-3.17) of emergency department attendances resulted in admission. Direct health care costs increased and peaked in the financial year 2017/2018 (admission costs: £25.1 million, emergency attendance costs: £45.7million). Dog bite related hospital admissions have increased solely in adults. Further work exploring human-dog interactions, stratified by demographic factors, is urgently needed to enable the development of appropriate risk reduction intervention strategies.

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Conflict of interest statement

All authors declare: no support from any organisation for the submitted work, no financial relationships with any organisations that might have an interest in the submitted work in the previous three years, no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work, except SOG who is a paid employee of Dogs Trust, a charity that works to promote dog welfare. Dogs Trust did not fund this research and did not play a part in planning this study, data analysis or writing of the manuscript. Dogs Trust did fund SOG’s PhD conducted between 2015 and 2020.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
National incidence of dog bite hospital admissions 1998–2018. Crude incidence = black squares, Age-standardised incidence = green diamonds and dashed line.
Figure 2
Figure 2
The average annual incidence of dog bite hospital admissions in England (1998–2018) by local authority (1 = Liverpool, 2 = Oxford, 3 = London). (The authors created this map in R (https://www.r-project.org/) using Local Authority boundary shape files created by the Office for National Statistics (Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0; Contains OS data Crown copyright and database right [2014].)).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Estimated direct health care costs of dog bite hospital admissions and accident and emergence attendance in England.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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