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Bed Availability, Occupancy and Utilisation

Report and explore bed availability, occupancy and utilisation.

This module includes analysis and insights by ward, specialty, day, week and month and can be compared against bed complement and availability... giving hospital staff, managers and clinicians as well as external bodies clearer insights into effectient management of their assets.

Cuts through the complexity of optimising bed utilisation

Cuts through the complexity of optimising bed utilisation

Bed availability and occupancy combines two sets of information;

  • Bed availability, maintained from the ward complement and bed closure information of PMS
  • Bed occupancy, maintained from the patient based transfer information provided by PMS, held in our data-warehouse as ‘Bed Episodes’, that is the period of time spent by a patient on a ward under the care of a consultant/specialty.

The maintenance of accurate bed availability data is an arduous task and is therefore usually restricted to providing details of the planned use of a ward, reflecting the staffing provided on each ward e.g. Surgical, Medical, Maternity and so on.

Bed usage mix

Bed usage mix

Each ward will usually have a planned ‘split’ of patients, for example sharing 30 beds between General Surgery (20) and Urology (10). In reality the availability of dependant resources (e.g. Theatres) and/or emergency admissions, as a result of external factors or unexpected incidents, may mean that this split is not maintained; there may be 15 General Surgery, 12 Urology and 3 Medical patients on the ward at any one time.

This module provides a way of cutting through these complexities and uncertainties.Occupancy is a reality and our data-warehouse can record and report on the actual mix. Comparison with thesummary information will show this reality and allow the planned situation to be compared with the actual, in this example, is an over utilisation of Urology and ‘Bed Borrowing’ by Medical.

Availability ‘flexing’ is also possible by using this module and it is possible to report occupancy based on the real data from the information recorded and to flex availability based on actual use for some reporting.

The standard module provides measures for:

  • Overnight stays (bed days)
  • Bed days available
  • % occupancy (calculated from the above two measures)
  • Bed complement (to allow analysis of closed beds)
  • Hours stay (to allow analysis of occupancy on mixed and day only wards) and
  • Movements (admissions, discharges and transfers in/out).

And the measures can be analysed by:

  • Wards by site (and grouped location if required)
  • Date (down to week and day of week, or day if required)
  • Specialty (note that individual beds are rarely allocated to consultant, although detailed occupancy is held at this level)
  • Ward type (day only, night only and day/night).