ArticleThe European journal of health economics : HEPAC : health economics in prevention and care2022
The impact of inpatient bed capacity on length of stay.
Article in The European journal of health economics : HEPAC : health economics in prevention and care, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 28 citations in OpenAlex.
- Emergency department crowding in the modern era: a systematic review (2018-2025).Clinical and experimental emergency medicine · 2026Pooled it
- Hospital capacity and operating room access for emergency general surgery patients : OR access and LOS for short-stay MIS EGS.Surgical endoscopy · 2026Article
- Contract incentives and behaviours of medical consultants in Ireland.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Textbook outcome after robotic liver surgery at a high-volume Scandinavian HPB center: an IWATE-based difficulty-stratified assessment of 200 cases.Surgical endoscopy · 2026Article
- Clinically-applicable prediction of hospital stay and patient similarity retrieval in paediatric cardiology using machine learning.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Dynamic demand forecasting and capacity assessment for emergency care system: a hybrid time series and machine learning approach with evidence from Beijing.BMC health services research · 2026Article
- The Reform That Was Never Completed: Why Greece Must Redesign Its Health Financing Architecture.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Prognostic factors associated with length of stay in children with an acute admission to a pediatric ward: a historical cohort study.BMC pediatrics · 2025Article
- Factors influencing the length of stay in the psychiatric unit of a Ghanaian teaching hospital: a retrospective study.Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology · 2025Article
- An interval type-2 fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making approach for patient bed allocation.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Connect Care Project, Bridging the Gap Between Acute and Post-Acute Care.Journal of general internal medicine · 2025Article
- Community integration after spinal cord injury rehabilitation: Predictors and causal mediators.The journal of spinal cord medicine · 2025Article
- Strategies to Reduce Hospital Length of Stay: Evidence and Challenges.Medicina (Kaunas, Lithuania) · 2025Review
- Developing a Novel Artificial Intelligence Framework to Measure the Balance of Clinical Versus Nonclinical Influences on Posthepatectomy Length of Stay.Annals of surgical oncology · 2025Article
- Characterizing pre-discharge interventions to reduce length of stay for older adults: A scoping review.PloS one · 2025Article
- Characteristics Associated with Length of Stay in Intensive Care Unit for Cancer Patients in China: A Nationwide Retrospective Cohort Study.Journal of multidisciplinary healthcare · 2025Article
- Albumin and psychological resilience: key modifiable factors for hospital length of stay in ulcerative colitis.Frontiers in nutrition · 2025Article
- Analyzing the 20-year declining trend of hospital length-of-stay in European countries with different healthcare systems and reimbursement models.International journal of health economics and management · 2024Article
- A New Approach for Understanding International Hospital Bed Numbers and Application to Local Area Bed Demand and Capacity Planning.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2024Article
- Influencing factors of length of stay among repeatedly hospitalized patients with mood disorders: a longitudinal study in China.Annals of general psychiatry · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
objectiveLarge reductions in inpatient length of stay and inpatient bed supply have occurred across health systems in recent years. However, the direction of causation between length of stay and bed supply is often overlooked. This study examines the impact of changes to inpatient bed supply, as a result of recession-induced healthcare expenditure changes, on emergency inpatient length of stay in Ireland between 2010 and 2015. STUDY
designWe analyse all public hospital emergency inpatient discharges in Ireland from 2010 to 2015 using the administrative Hospital In-Patient Enquiry dataset. We use changes to inpatient bed supply across hospitals over time to examine the impact of bed supply on length of stay. Linear, negative binomial, and hospital-month-level fixed effects models are estimated.
resultsU-shaped trends are observed for both average length of stay and inpatient bed supply between 2010 and 2015. A consistently large positive relationship is found between bed supply and length of stay across all regression analyses. Between 2010 and 2012 while length of stay fell by 6.4%, our analyses estimate that approximately 42% (2.7% points) of this reduction was associated with declines in bed supply.
conclusionChanges in emergency inpatient length of stay in Ireland between 2010 and 2015 were closely related to changes in bed supply during those years. The use of length of stay as an efficiency measure should be understood in the contextual basis of other health system changes. Lower length of stay may be indicative of the lack of resources or available bed supply as opposed to reduced demand for care or the shifting of care to other settings.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.