Letter

Hospital bed utilisation in the NHS and Kaiser Permanente

BMJ 2004; 328 doi: 10.1136/bmj.328.7439.583-b (Published 4 March 2004)
Cite this as: BMJ 2004;328:583.3

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Quality of care, length of stay, and readmissions need to be considered

  1. Shah Ebrahim, professor of epidemiology of ageing (Shah.Ebrahim@bristol.ac.uk),
  2. Stephen Frankel, professor of epidemiology and public health,
  3. George Davey Smith, professor of clinical epidemiology
  1. Department of Social Medicine, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 2PR

    EDITOR—Ham et al report that bed days used for a range of common diagnoses among people aged 65 and over are substantially higher in the NHS than in US managed care programmes.1

    Stroke admissions contribute most to the extra bed days in the NHS and also show the largest relative differences from the US comparators. Comparable incidences are not available, but mortality, a reasonable proxy, shows that …

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