Repeated use of hospital-based services and delayed hospital discharges in a population-based cohort of autistic adults in Canada.

lay abstractWe know that autistic people have more health problems and are more likely to go to the emergency department and get hospitalized than other people, but we know less about the problems they have once they get to the hospital. In this study, we looked at all autistic adults in Ontario and compared them to adults who were not autistic and to adults who had other kinds of developmental disabilities to see who came back to the emergency department in the month after an emergency department visit, who got re-hospitalized in the month after being sent home from hospital, and who stayed in the hospital longer than they needed to because there was no place appropriate for them to go to. We found that both autistic males and females were more likely to have these things happen to them than the same age- and sex-matched adults who did not have developmental disabilities. We also found that adults with other kinds of developmental disabilities had similar problems to autistic people. This makes us think that we need to work harder to improve health care for autistic adults and adults with other developmental disabilities when they come to hospital. We also need to make community services work better, and work more closely with hospital services, so that people only come to hospital when they need to and that they can go home when they are ready.