The impact of atypical intrahospital transfers on patient outcomes: a mixed methods study.

ABSTRACT: The architectural design of hospitals worldwide is centred around individual departments, which require the movement of patients between wards. However, patients do not always take the simplest route from admission to discharge, but can experience convoluted movement patterns, particularly when bed availability is low. Few studies have explored the impact of these rarer, atypical trajectories. Using a mixed-method explanatory sequential study design, we firstly used three continuous years of electronic health record data prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, from 55,152 patients admitted to a London hospital network to define the ward specialities by patient type using the Herfindahl-Hirschman index. We explored the impact of 'regular transfers' between pairs of wards with shared specialities, '

SUBMITTER: Mendelsohn E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10507077 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature