Discharge of the term newborn is a critical issue in perinatal care. The average length of stay of the motherinfant dyad after delivery declined steadily from 1970 until the mid-1990s (early discharge ≤ 48 hours, very early discharge ≤ 24 hours after birth) [1]. Several subsequent studies [2-5] have reported that too short a hospital stay can place an infant at risk for significant jaundice, fe...

INTRODUCTION At Singapore General Hospital, approximately 240 infants of the 1500 deliveries per annum are delivered preterm, many of very low birth weight-median of 1210 g-often have extended hospital stays, even after they are declared medically fit. METHODS To better understand the discharge patterns of the preterm infants in the department, a team of two neonatologists and two nurses perf...

BACKGROUND Because of increased pressure to shorten hospital stays, some advocate discharging patients with pyloric stenosis within four hours of pyloromyotomy. Because some patients have persistent emesis after pyloromyotomy and thus require prolonged hospitalization to prevent dehydration, it would be helpful to be able to predict in which patients this will occur. METHODS We conducted a re...

OBJECTIVES To evaluate potential costs and savings from implementing an evaluation tool that uses bedside review of antibiotic use and infection management to assess whether patients with infections in acute medical and surgical wards could have their antibiotic regimen changed and be safely managed out of hospital. METHODS The tool was implemented in 30 acute wards in five UK hospital trusts...

AIMS To identify, without additional investigation, a large group of myocardial infarction patients at low risk who would qualify for early discharge. METHODS The decision rule was developed in 647 unselected patients with consecutively admitted myocardial infarction, and validated in 825 others. Daily event-rates were calculated for major (death, ventricular fibrillation, recurrent infarctio...

Planned early discharge of mothers and babies from St. Luke's Maternity Hospital, Bradford, has been taking place since 1958. The purpose of this paper is to describe the effect it has had on child health in the city, and, in particular, to consider its safety and acceptability from a paediatric point of view. Theobald (1959, 1962) depicted the form and purpose of the "Bradford experiment," and...

Simple criteria were used to select a low-risk group of patients after acute myocardial infarction. The criteria depended on the presence or absence of diabetes, pulmonary oedema, serious rhythm disorders, and recurrent cardiac pain. Patients in the low-risk category with a suitable home environment were discharged from hospital after five to seven days (mean 6.2 days); they constituted 47% of ...

OBJECTIVE To assess the safety of hospital discharge 24 hours after laparoscopic radical prostatectomy and to identify possible factors associated with longer hospital stays. MATERIAL AND METHODS Retrospective study of patients diagnosed with localized prostate cancer underwent to laparoscopic radical prostatectomy consecutively between May of 2007 and December of 2010. Those patients who met...