Hudson Darren, Singh Gurmeet
School of Health Information Science, University of Victoria.
Clinical Sciences Building, University of Alberta.
Stud Health Technol Inform. 2019;257:170-175.
Hospital capacity strain is ubiquitous, and a significant stressor in critical care. Avoidable days (AD) are frequently used as a metric of capacity. Using a Markov chain model, we studied the relationship between AD and surgical cancellations in a cardiovascular ICU. The model varied the probability of discharging a patient to study this effect over a pool of 108 simulated patients with length of stay data reflecting the actual population. The model behaved as expected with decreasing AD with increasing probability of patient discharge. However, there was no effect on the surgical cancellation rate. We conclude that there is no relationship between AD and critical care capacity as measured by surgical cancellation rate.
