[How many physicians are required in a hospital ward?]

Hospital medical activities are performed in various departments, such as general wards, functional units, outpatients' departments (OPD), and administrative areas. This study examined the possibility of redistributing medical performances from a normal ward to an OPD for an average accident surgery population. It is shown that up to 89% of the medical performances can be produced in an outpatients' clinic (OPC) in spite of only minimal shifts of medical care. The collected data only reflect the picture of routine medical care in accident surgery; in principle, however, the results should apply to other groups of patients, and promote a quality increase in parallel to a cost reduction of the overall hospital treatment.