Two and a half years ago the Ministry of Health asked the 15 regional hospital boards to expand their psychiatric facilities for adolescents. The National Association for Mental Health then collected detailed information about the boards' expansion plans. But late last year a further NAMH survey revealed that in the 2\ years since the Ministry's call there had been a national increase of only 3...

There is a long history of approaches for predicting the need for hospital beds at specific locations. Past methods have tended to regard as key variables the ser vice area population, hospital use rate per population unit, average length of stay, and occupancy rates. The usual client for a bed-need study is an individual hos pital. There is no constraint on the forecasting meth odology to ensu...

OBJECTIVE dimensional guidelines for bedrails have been developed to minimise the risk of patient entrapment within the bed. We examined whether bedrails in a large Irish teaching hospital complied with these standards. DESIGN AND SETTING survey of 60 accessible beds in six hospital wards. METHODS a specialised cone and cylinder tool that mimics the size and weight of a small adult neck and...

BACKGROUND In this paper, the hypothesis that the spatial distribution of hospital beds is more even in countries with socialist or social democratic governments than in countries with conservative or Christian democratic governments was tested. To avoid the confounding influences of historical and institutional differences between countries, we used the Federal Republic of Germany as a case st...

INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES To investigate the relationship between in-hospital mortality due to acute myocardial infarction and type of hospital, discharge service, and treatment provided. METHODS Retrospective analysis of 100 993 hospital discharges with a principal diagnosis of myocardial infarction in hospitals of the Spanish National Health Service. In-hospital mortality was adjusted for...

FROM time to time assessments have been made of the number of hospital beds required per thousand of the population served. In 1950 the Ministry of Health published a Memorandum on the Development of Consultant Services which, on the overall pattern suggests a figure of from six to seven acute beds per thousand, excluding maternity beds. It is, however, essential to define the particular area, ...

About one-third of the general practices in the Oxfordshire Health District have access to beds in community hospitals as well as district general hospitals. Hospital Activity Analysis data were used to calculate the average number of hospital beds occupied daily by patients registered with each general practice in the district. Practices with and without access to community hospitals were comp...

Introduction The healthcare system in Japan is characterized by long hospital stay and a large excess of hospital beds. The average length of hospital stay, and the number of beds per population for acute-care hospitals, are both about twice the average of those in other OECD countries. Insufficient functional differentiation of Japan's hospitals has been claimed as the cause of such inefficien...