Evaluation of Appropriateness Admission and Hospital Stay at Educational Hospital

Appropriate admissions and patients' length of stay are two of the most important indicators of efficient health care delivery in hospitals. Paying due attention to these indicators may lead to optimal use of hospital resources as well as provision of ambulatory services to a larger population of patients. The purpose of the current study is to quantify the rate of inappropriate hospital admissions and days of hospital stay to identify factors affecting them.

Data were collected regarding admissions and length of stay of 1815 patients admitted to an educational hospital in Tehran, Iran, with a total 12,629 days of hospitalization using the Appropriateness Evaluation Protocol. A qualitative study was conducted using content analysis method by analyzing data from interviews with the hospital personnel about the factors affecting patients' length of stay.

The results indicated that the average length of stay in medical and surgical wards was 9.4 to 6.3 days, and 8.5% of admissions and 3.4% of stays were inappropriate. The necessity to receive nursing care and/or to receive medical services and/or the patients' conditions accounted for 57.6% of total hospitalization days, followed by the need to receive nursing care alone (36.6%). Planning/Procedures/ Personnel factors were responsible for 77.3% of inappropriate stays. The qualitative study revealed that in addition to sound in house policy setting, abundance of suitable equipment and facilities at the hospital site had positively affected the appropriateness of hospital stay while incoordination of health care delivery groups, rotation of residents and other wards personnel and lack of a proper complementary patient follow-up system, had a negative impact on the same indicator.

Inappropriate admissions and inappropriate stays are influenced by numerous factors, both inside and outside of the hospitals; the results of the current study indicate that structural factors such as techniques adopted in the studied hospital, contributed significantly to decreasing inappropriate stays. Improving and upgrading these techniques will make optimal use of hospital beds possible.