Description of vital signs data measurement frequency in a medical/surgical unit at a community hospital in United States

Vitals signs are measured at scheduled intervals by nurses in typical general wards. Vital signs may be measured more frequently if the patient condition deteriorates. In many units, the vital signs measurement frequency for some patients is different from the scheduled frequency due to various reasons such as staffing, patient acuity etc. In this article, we describe the actual measurement frequency in patients admitted to general ward in a community hospital in Arizona, US. We present the data in the form of 2 sets of graphs. The first set of graphs are histograms which show the distribution of the number of measurements in a 24 h period for 6 different vital signs. The second set of graphs show the proportion of the patient population who had a measurement of a vital sign for each hour of the last day of patient's general ward stay. The significance of this data on predicting deterioration is discussed in Ghosh et al. (2017) [1].