Variability in admissions and lengths of stay inherently leads to variability in bed occupancy. The aim of this paper is to analyse the impact of these sources of variability on the required amount of capacity and to determine admission quota for scheduled admissions to regulate the occupancy pattern. For the impact of variability on the required number of beds, we use a heavy-traffic limit the...

Two complementary studies were carried out. a) A three months study on nosocomial infection frequency, with a simultaneous assessment of the nosocomial infection risk factors (infected or non infected body on entry in the department, the kind of pathology, simplified scores of seriousness) and of the length of the hospital stays to compare the average length of stay for overinfected patients an...

Closing long-stay psychiatric beds remains contentious. The review by Winkler et al in this issue examines 23 studies of deinstitutionalisation for the outcomes of people discharged from psychiatric hospitals after an admission of 1 year or longer. The majority of these studies identified no cases of homelessness, incarceration or suicide after discharge from hospital.

Objective-To examine whether there are too many hospital beds in London. Design-Analysis of data from the Hospital InPatient Enquiry, Mental Health Enquiry, health service indicators, and Emergency Bed Service. Setting-England, London, and inner London. Results-Hospital admission rates for acute plus geriatric services for London residents were very similar to the national values in all age gro...

OBJECTIVE To establish whether reinstitutionalisation is occurring in mental health care and, if so, with what variations between western European countries. DESIGN Comparison of data on changes in service provision. SETTING Six European countries with different traditions of mental health care that have all experienced deinstitutionalisation since the 1970s--England, Germany, Italy, the Ne...

BACKGROUND Recently, there has been a revived interest in the validity of the Penrose hypothesis, which was originally postulated over 75 years ago. It suggests an inverse relationship between the numbers of psychiatric hospital beds and the sizes of prison population. This study aims to investigate the association between psychiatric hospital beds and prison populations in a large sample of 26...

Cottage Hospitals?that the Cottage Hospital idea may have been rather overdone because of the steady falling off in the number of occupied beds, and that in England and Wales, excluding London, they had 1,839 beds vacant throughout the whole of last year. No one appreciates more than myself the value of Sir Napier Burnett's report, but I regret that he has lent the weight of his great authority...

Context and aim: The Danish hospital sector is facing a significant rebuilding programme, driven by a political desire to concentrate activity in fewer and larger hospitals. Our aim is to analyse whether the current configuration of Danish hospitals is subject to scale economies that may justify such plans and to estimate an optimal hospital size. Methods: We estimate cost functions using panel...

BACKGROUND The main objective of this study is to apply autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models to make real-time predictions on the number of beds occupied in Tan Tock Seng Hospital, during the recent SARS outbreak. METHODS This is a retrospective study design. Hospital admission and occupancy data for isolation beds was collected from Tan Tock Seng hospital for the period 14...