No abstract

No abstract

This article explores the role of hospitals in providing geriatric services and identifies associated community and hospital characteristics. The sample is 4571 community hospitals responding to the 1995 American Hospital Association (AHA) Annual Survey. Most hospitals offer some geriatric services; the mean is 3.3. The dependent variable is an index of 13 geriatric services created from the AHA data. Independent variables are taken from the AHA survey, Area Resource File, and census data. Regression analysis explains fifteen percent of the variance. Hospital characteristics predicting provision of geriatric services are non-profit tax status, hospital bed size and system membership. Community characteristics predicting provision of geriatric services included higher population density, high percentage of county aged, and county nursing facility beds. Hospital characteristics yielded slightly higher predictive ability than did community characteristics. The findings suggest policies to increase hospital leadership in providing access to senior services require a multi-dimensional approach.

INTRODUCTIONThe Department of Health in the UK wants the National Health Service to make £20 Billion worth of efficiency savings by 2015 to reinvest.In the UK the General Hospitals use paper records which are then scanned to create electronic records while Psychiatric Hospitals require that information to be typed on to their electronic records and these electronic records are not available to each other.Therefore liaison psychiatry assessments require a written entry to be made in the Medical notes and a second entry typed on to the psychiatric electronic patient record which requires a full psychiatric history.ObjectiveThis duplication in typing information was consuming a considerable amount of this Teams time and resources which could have instead been spent with patients.AimTo identify how much time is spent by Staff typing information on to the psychiatric electronic patient records.MethodsWe electronically checked for the preceding three months the amount of time spent typing information on to the electronic records after every liaison psychiatry assessment.We were then able to obtain the average for every week.ResultOn average about 36 to 40 hours were spent every week typing information on to the electronic records.ConclusionLiaison Psychiatry should dispense with the requirement for information to be duplicated on to the electronic patient records and should instead scan the written entry made in the Medical notes.This should lead to a saving of about £50,000, enough to employ an additional member of Staff every week.

No abstract