The number of hospital beds per head of population has fallen by more than 2% a year since 1980. Levels of bed occupancy have risen during this period. Appropriate bed occupancy is crucial to the NHS, as occupancy rates exceeding 85% in acute hospitals are associated with problems in dealing with emergency and elective admissions. We aimed to develop a valid instrument for the objective assessm...

I wonder whether at any or tne meetings and conferences of the N.A.M.H. the question has been considered of the chief causes for the volume of depression there seems to be? This results in a good many of the beds in mental hospitals being occupied by patients suffering chiefly from depression. I know it is a difficult question, and maybe it is one that members of the B.M.A. and other relevant s...

The Republic of Ireland's Medico-Social Research Board spent over half of its £800,000 budget on setting up a hospital inpatient enquiry scheme because of a need "to study the cost effectiveness of health care". It emerged that in Ireland the number of hospital beds used daily per hundred thousand population was ten per cent higher than in Scotland mainly because Irish patients stayed in hospit...

This study investigates the bottlenecks in the emergency care chain of cardiac in-patient flow. The primary goal is to determine the optimal bed allocation over the care chain given a maximum number of refused admissions. Another objective is to provide deeper insight in the relation between natural variation in arrivals and length of stay and occupancy rates. The strong focus on raising occupa...

This study describes the characteristics of Missouri insanity acquittees, which numbered 797 on July 1, 1992. Unlike reports of characterization data from other states, the study endeavors to link the characteristics to the design of Missouri's insanity acquittee system. This is accomplished by analyzing Missouri's insanity acquittee system and comparing it with the system designs and character...

The effectiveness and cost of day hospital care in rehabilitation were studied in a randomised controlled trial in 120 elderly patients who were assessed at referral and six weeks and five months later in activities of daily living skills and mood. Day hospital patients were compared with a control group, who were managed as they would have been before the availability of day hospital care. Day...

An outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) occurred in Hong Kong in late February 2003, resulting in 8,096 cumulative cases with 774 deaths. The outbreak was amplified by nosocomial transmission in many hospitals. Using mathematical modeling, we simulated the number of new incident and prevalent cases of SARS after one infected person was admitted to a hospital (index case). The si...

BACKGROUND In Japan, as in many other countries, several quality and safety assurance measures have been implemented since the 1990's. This has occurred in spite of cost containment efforts. Although government and hospital decision-makers demand comprehensive analysis of these activities at the hospital-wide level, there have been few studies that actually quantify them. Therefore, the aims of...

The winter bed crisis is a cyclical phenomenon which appears in British hospitals every year, two or three weeks after Christmas. The crisis is usually attributed to factors such as the bad weather, influenza, older people, geriatricians, lack of cash or nurse shortages. However, a possible alternative explanation could be that beds within the hospital are blocked because of lack of social serv...

Korea is the only developed country that saw an increase in the number of psychiatric beds with the longest average length of stay of psychiatric patients for the past decades. This phenomenon can be explained regarding the payment system, the law, and society. Korea is in a critical position concerning mental health policy. How it paves the way for reducing psychiatric admissions will provide ...