The use of bed distribution and service population indexes for hospital bed allocation

To provide an empirical base for bed reallocation within a hospital planning jurisdiction in Canada, this article proposes a population-based method to measure the distribution of acute care beds for each district and the service load for each hospital. The measure for the bed distribution (BDI) is the number of beds per 1,000 age-sex-adjusted number of residents in a district, while the service load of a hospital is measured by the number of persons being served per bed (SPI). The number of beds allocated to each district, or the number of persons served by each hospital, was estimated by applying the hospital service population model, which employs both relevance- and commitment-index methods. The method thus proposed was applied to Alberta data. It appears that both BDI and SPI measures are stable across the variation of methods or data sources, yet sensitive enough to detect changes over the years. Using these indexes, potentially over- or underbedded districts and over- or underloaded hospitals can be identified for further investigation so that possible reallocation of acute care beds among the hospitals may take place.