Trends in hospital and intensive care admissions in the Netherlands attributable to the very elderly in an ageing population

The Dutch population is ageing and it is unknown how this is affecting trends in the percentage of hospital and intensive care unit (ICU) admissions attributable to patients aged 80 years or older, the very elderly. We present data on the percentage of the very elderly in the general population and the percentage of hospital admissions attributable to the very elderly. We subsequently performed a longitudinal cross-sectional study on ICU admissions from hospitals participating in the National Intensive Care Evaluation registry for the period 2005 to 2014. We modeled the percentage of adult ICU admissions and treatment days attributable to the very elderly separately for ICU admissions following cardiac surgery and other reasons. The percentage of Dutch adults aged 80 years and older, increased from 4.5 % in 2005 to 5.4 % in 2014 (p-value