Utilization of facilities of a university hospital: length of inpatient stay in various hospital departments.

The lengths of hospital stay among adult inpatients discharged during 1962 from the medical and surgical specialty departments of a large urban university-affiliated general hospital have been examined. Data are shown comparing the durations of hospitalization of patients who had a private physician directly responsible for their hospital care (private patients) and of those who did not (staff patients). The relation between the lengths of stay of private patients and those of staff patients varied considerably from one hospital department to another. On the medical services, staff patients had longer hospital stays than did private patients, a discrepancy that could not be accounted for by differences between the two groups in age, race, sex, or source of payment for hospitalization and it is being studied further. A major cause of the apparent difference in lengths of hospitalization between private and staff surgical patients proved to be inconsistencies in the criteria used to define the terms “hospital admission” and “inpatient” among various patient groups. Some of the possible effects of variations in the definition of these terms and of the terms “medical patients” and “surgical patients” in hospital-use studies are discussed.