OBJECTIVE To assess the impact of admission to different hospital types on early and 1-year outcomes in patients with acute coronary syndrome (ACS). METHODS Between 1997 and 2009, 31 010 ACS patients from 76 Swiss hospitals were enrolled in the AMIS Plus registry. Large tertiary institutions with continuous (24 hour/7 day) cardiac catheterisation facilities were classified as type A hospitals...

BACKGROUND In order to measure and analyse the technical efficiency of district hospitals in Ghana, the specific objectives of this study were to (a) estimate the relative technical and scale efficiency of government, mission, private and quasi-government district hospitals in Ghana in 2005; (b) estimate the magnitudes of output increases and/or input reductions that would have been required to...

A retrospective analysis of data showed that patients in general stayed for shorter duration in general hospital psychiatric clinic than in mental hospital.

A paediatric day assessment unit was opened in May 1995. An audit of the first year's activity showed that, despite an increase in emergency admissions of 8.4%, the number of children admitted as an emergency overnight was reduced by 3% in paediatrics and 7.2% in surgery. In the first year, 1731 children were assessed as an emergency of whom 658 did not require admission to the inpatient ward. ...

BACKGROUND The employment of physician assistants (PAs) is a strategy to improve access to care. Since the new millennium, a handful of countries have turned to PAs as a means to bridge the growing gap between the supply and demand of medical services. However, little is known about this new workforce entity from the patient's perspective. The objective of this study was to assess the willingne...

The psychiatric hospital environment plays a significant, though often underappreciated, role in patient and staff functioning. This column reviews the literature on important environmental and therapeutic issues in psychiatric hospital design. Research findings and clinical conjecture reported over the past 50 years indicate that intervening environmentally through clinically informed, patient...

BACKGROUND Hospital certification and recognition programs represent 2 independent but commonly used systems to distinguish hospitals, yet they have not been directly compared. This study assessed acute ischemic stroke quality of care measure conformity by hospitals receiving Primary Stroke Center (PSC) certification and those receiving the American Heart Association's Get With The Guidelines-S...

BACKGROUND The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act established the Hospital Readmission Reduction Program (HRRP) to penalize hospitals with excessive 30-day hospital readmissions of Medicare enrollees for specific conditions. This policy was aimed at increasing the quality of care delivered to patients and decreasing the amount of money paid for potentially preventable hospital readmissi...

BACKGROUND The purposes of this paper were to examine whether patient dumping has occurred under the National Health Insurance and to explore hospital administrators' attitudes toward the practice of patient dumping in Taiwan. METHODS The study subjects were administrators in general hospitals that were accredited by the Taiwan Joint Commission on Hospital Accreditation as medical centers, re...

BACKGROUND To assess the development of and variation in lengths of stay in Dutch hospitals and to determine the potential reduction in hospital days if all Dutch hospitals would have an average length of stay equal to that of benchmark hospitals. METHODS The potential reduction was calculated using data obtained from 69 hospitals that participated in the National Medical Registration (LMR). ...