Differences in ethnicity and emergency department visits in the Negev

The population of the Negev consists mainly of Jews and Bedouin, who have very different life styles. Patients of both ethnic groups use our emergency department exclusively, providing a unique opportunity to study comparative patient habits. In gathering and processing the information we used Data Mining technology, which allows search for unique patterns in large data bases. We examined demographic data on some 64,000 emergency department visits during 1997-8, mostly medical and surgical cases, but not trauma cases. Many more were by Bedouin than Jews, and between the ages of 25 and 44, more by women than men. There were changes in trends in comparison with an arrival survey conducted some 11 years before.