ArticleSocial science & medicine (1982)2022
The health cost of reducing hospital bed capacity.
Article in Social science & medicine (1982), 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Assessing effectiveness of HOSPITAL score and LACE index for predicting 30-day readmissions in a tertiary care hospital in Pakistan: a retrospective cohort study.BMC health services research · 2026Article
- Internal Regulation Core as a hub of disruptive innovation in hospital management: a scoping review protocol.BMJ open · 2026Article
- Improving the value of population health data for health policy and decision-making using machine learning algorithms in EQ-5D-5L index estimation.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Regional disparities and multidimensional determinants of hospital bed allocation in China: spatial evidence for public health policymaking.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- Hospitalizations and inpatient resource consumption of patients suffering from chronic disease - Past trend and forecast for Switzerland.BMC health services research · 2025Article
- Article
- Estimating the Incremental Cost Per QALY Produced by the Spanish NHS: A Fixed-Effect Econometric Approach.PharmacoEconomics · 2025Article
- 2022 insights on hospital bed distribution in Saudi Arabia: evaluating needs to achieve global standards.BMC health services research · 2024Article
- "Returning to the core tasks": a qualitative interview study about how general practitioners in home health care solved problems during the COVID-19 pandemic.Scandinavian journal of primary health care · 2024Article
- Fast track to stroke unit for patients not eligible for acute intervention, a case-control register study on 1066 patients.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Making the rules make sense: valuation of constrained resources.The European journal of health economics : HEPAC : health economics in prevention and care · 2023Article
- Predicting risk factors for pediatric mortality in clinical trial research: A retrospective, cross-sectional study using a Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project database.Journal of clinical and translational science · 2023Article
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2 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In the past two decades, most high-income countries have reduced their hospital bed capacity. This could be a sign of increased efficiency but could also reflect a degradation in quality of care. In this paper, we use repeated cross-sections on mortality and staffed hospital beds per capita in all 21 Swedish regions to estimate the potential death toll from reduced bed capacity. Between 2001 and 2019, mortality and beds decreased across all regions, but regions making smaller bed reductions experienced on average greater decreases in mortality, equivalent to one less death per three beds retained. This estimate is stable to a wide range of specifications and to adjustment for potential confounders, which supports a causal interpretation. Our results imply that by providing one more bed, Swedish health care could produce about three quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) at a cost of SEK 400,000 (∼US$40,000) per QALY. These findings could be informative about the marginal productivity of health care and support the credibility of empirical work attempting to estimate the opportunity cost of funding new healthcare interventions subject to a constrained budget.
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Registered trials
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