Hospital Patients Being Sent Home Earlier

Source: Reuters, National Center for Health Statistics, CDC's 2001 National Hospital Discharge Survey, 4/10/03, Survey: www.cdc.gov/nchs

WASHINGTON - Hospital patients are being sent home much sooner thanks in part to better surgical techniques and improved drugs, U.S. government statisticians reported Wednesday.

Trends

CDC experts noted that the average length of stay as measured by the survey rarely changes dramatically year to year, but has been gradually trending downward for all patients but children for the past three decades.

The most dramatic decrease in the length of stay has been for elderly patients, dropping from an average of 12.6 days in 1970 to 5.8 days in 2001. The average stay for children has held steady at around 4.5 days. The rate of hospitalization for most conditions also has decreased over the past two decades. An exception is congestive heart failure, which has gradually increased by 62% for those 65 and over since 1980.

CDC said the increase reflects the success in treating through drugs and surgery more acute forms of heart disease, such as heart attacks, thus extending the life of many elderly people and making it more likely they will develop a chronic heart problem.

In 2001, it found 32.7 million patients stayed in U.S. hospitals. Most were there for three days or less, and only 16% stayed for longer than a week.

Factors Contributing to Shorter Hospital Stays

• Medical advances
• Payment for care improvements
• Better anesthesia leading to better after-effects
• Less-invasive surgical methods such as laparoscopy and endoscopy
• Safer pain relief drugs

Leading Reasons for Hospitalization in 2001

• Heart disease (1 million procedures to clear blocked arteries, and 300,000 bypass operations)
• Psychoses (1.6 million discharges)
• Pneumonia (1.3 million),
• Cancer (1.2 million)
• Fractures (1 million)