Survey of hospital admissions of residents of Orange County, North Carolina, 1964-1965.

Much information concerning the use of medical facilities by various subgroups of the population has been collected in a variety of ways, depending on the investigating groups' interests and their access to data. The data gathered by National Center for Health Statistics[1,2] have been valuable, but have two limitations: (1) Until recently, most of them have been derived from family interviews rather than from actual records of use of facilities and (2) they have been collected from samples representative of the entire United States, and may or may not reflect trends in smaller geographic or political subdivisions. Data on the hospitalizations of the citizens of a functional political unit, such as an entire county, should prove helpful in planning health facilities in that and similar counties in the future. Also, for hospitals which serve as the major teaching settings of medical schools, it is important to know to what extent they are used as community hospitals and to what extent as referral centers. For medical students experience with patients from both types of institutions is valuable, and one or the other may have to be encouraged to provide well balanced experience. The use of the hospital will depend in part on the presence or absence of other hospitals and in part on the pattern of hospital use by physicians and patients. This study report provides data on: (1) The hospitalization experience for an entire rural county which contains a teaching hospital and (2) the types of admissions to such a teaching hospital. Orange County is located in central piedmont North Carolina. Its 1960 population was 34,844 (excluding its university students); approximately 50 per cent lived within Chapel Hill Township. The county consists largely of two groups of persons: those connected directly or indirectly with the University of North Carolina and located in and around Chapel Hill Township, and those connected with farming or the textile industry and living in the agricultural areas of the county. Chapel Hill Township and the medical school are located in the extreme southeastern portion of the county; a major highway provides access to hospitals in other counties as easily as to the medical school hospital in Orange County. In the mid-1950s the University of North Carolina School of Medicine expanded from a two-year to a four-year school, and its students began to be