Mortality rises by two percent a day when hospital beds are full — sometimes significantly before full bed capacity is reached, according to a new study. Small hospitals are particularly affected.
For the study, researchers at the University of Basel evaluated data from nearly 1.2 million patients from 102 Swiss hospitals, according to a press release from the university on Monday. This with the aim of investigating the relationship between bed occupancy and 14-day mortality in hospitals.
The size of the hospital is crucial
It became critical when a certain threshold of occupied beds was reached. Where this threshold was, differed from hospital to hospital. In the hospitals studied, this threshold was between 42.1 percent and 95.9 percent.
The decisive factor for this difference is the size of the hospital. In principle, the higher the average bed occupancy of a hospital, the higher the threshold. The critical occupancy rate was around 60 percent in the small hospitals and around 90 percent in the large hospitals. If the average occupancy is low, greater fluctuations can occur.
The sticking point is the staff
“It could happen, for example, that a hospital has an average of 120 beds and that one day in the year there are 200 beds occupied – that is huge,” said study leader Michael Simon at the request of the Keystone-SDA news agency. Due to these strongly fluctuating loads, the threshold is lower and therefore reached more quickly.
The staff is the bottleneck, it said. The number of doctors and nursing staff remains relatively constant, no matter how many patients are in hospital. In addition, certain treatments can no longer be carried out or can only be carried out with a delay if there is a high workload.
According to Simon, the problem can be solved by reducing fluctuations in occupancy. He sees the solutions at a political level: “Bundling the clinics or closer cooperation between the clinics leads to fewer fluctuations and thus reduces the risk,” says Simon.
(SDA)