As medicine becomes more successful the demand for acute care can only increase. Before modern intensive care many patients died during their first major medical emergency. Nowadays, even for octogenarians, death is an unusual outcome for any acute emergency admission. The inevitable consequence of this increased survival is that more patients have the opportunity to present again as acute emergencies. The received wisdom is that the rising demand for acute medical care is caused by these elderly returning patients with multiple co-morbid conditions.
