397 Seasonal Variation in Acute Cholecystitis; An Analysis to Predict Resources Allocation

Abstract Background Acute cholecystitis accounts for 20% of Emergency General Surgical admissions. The concept of seasonal variation is still a developing concept in surgical literature. Whether acute cholecystitis also follows a seasonal trend remains to be established. Aim Given the struggle healthcare system has been facing towards resource and staff allocation to deliver best possible patient care, we thought this may be a step forward to predict North Wales demand of resources seasonally and make appropriate arrangements ahead of time. Method We performed a retrospective analysis of patients across North Wales who had a discharging diagnosis of acute cholecystitis from January 2010 to December 2019. Chi-square goodness-of-fit test was used to analyse seasonality of acute cholecystitis adjusting for variation in number of days between seasons. The number of days for seasons were taken as 92, 92, 91, and 90.25 for spring, summer, fall, and winter, respectively. Results Overall, 4100 patients presented to the three hospitals across North Wales with acute cholecystitis during the study period. The frequency of hospital admissions varied between months (minimum February n = 302, maximum July n = 373) and seasons (minimum winter n = 971, maximum spring n = 1067). After applying chi-square goodness-of-fit test to check significant seasonality, we did not find any significant seasonal variation in acute cholecystitis (p-value = 0.262). Conclusions Our data failed to show any significant seasonal variation in patients presenting with acute cholecystitis in North Wales. We recommend prospective collection of data at national level to validate our results.