12-02-2020, 02:09 PM
I believe the new method of counting hospital beds is effectively measuring staff on duty on any particular day.
If you are any business administrator, how many extra staff do you want at work that you don't really need that day?
Of course it depends upon whether being short staffed is disastrous, whether workers' contracts prevents you from adjusting staff as need be, how predictable the need for workers is for any particular day or week, etc.
Would you keep having 50% more staff than needed? 20%?
If you were to keep 25% more staff than needed, as a hospital administrator you'd appear to have 20% free beds. If you keep 20% more staff than needed, you'd have about 16.7% free beds.
I am not convinced that the new way of counting available beds is showing us anything more than the levels of staffing that the hospital is choosing to set from day to day.
By the new numbers, in November, the total (occupied + unoccupied) number of ICU beds ranged from a high of 363 to a low of 321 (down 12%). Non_ICU beds ranged from 2046 down to 1968 (down 4%). The latest data is for Nov.30, at which point there were a total of 331 ICU beds and 2008 non_ICU beds.
Given this, I don't believe that the number of usable & unoccupied ICU beds is the number of "available" ICU beds (52) nor the total is 331, but is actually better represented as 84 of a total of 363 (23%).
If you are any business administrator, how many extra staff do you want at work that you don't really need that day?
Of course it depends upon whether being short staffed is disastrous, whether workers' contracts prevents you from adjusting staff as need be, how predictable the need for workers is for any particular day or week, etc.
Would you keep having 50% more staff than needed? 20%?
If you were to keep 25% more staff than needed, as a hospital administrator you'd appear to have 20% free beds. If you keep 20% more staff than needed, you'd have about 16.7% free beds.
I am not convinced that the new way of counting available beds is showing us anything more than the levels of staffing that the hospital is choosing to set from day to day.
By the new numbers, in November, the total (occupied + unoccupied) number of ICU beds ranged from a high of 363 to a low of 321 (down 12%). Non_ICU beds ranged from 2046 down to 1968 (down 4%). The latest data is for Nov.30, at which point there were a total of 331 ICU beds and 2008 non_ICU beds.
Given this, I don't believe that the number of usable & unoccupied ICU beds is the number of "available" ICU beds (52) nor the total is 331, but is actually better represented as 84 of a total of 363 (23%).