The emergency department (ed) in the middletown general hospital sees about 200 patients each day. on average, 150 of these are discharged to home after being seen; but about 50 of the patients seen need to stay overnight in a hospital bed. about 20 percent of these are on "observation" status, meaning that an admission decision has not yet been made, pending some test results or the result of an overnight observation stay. the remaining 80 percent are admitted directly. currently all patients who stay overnight (whether admitted or on observation status) are put into an inpatient bed . that is, there is no separate observation area in which patients can be boarded.
if 80 percent of observation patients are discharged to home, and 20 percent are upgraded to inpatient status (and these then stay an average of 5.8 days), what is the average census of admitted patients in the hospital? if there are 270 inpatient beds in middletown general, what is the utilization of the beds (occupancy rate in percentage of beds filled)? (hint: the flow of admitted patients will be those admitted directly from the ed plus those admitted from observation status, and both of these stay an average 5.8 days.)