A controlled intervention in reduction of redundant hospital days

Background. Inappropriate use of hospital services, in the form of unjustified hospital stay days (HSD), constitutes a major burden on a health budget. Reduction of unjustified HSD was achieved in a medical ward in a previous intervention study. Methods. A controlled intervention aimed at reducing unjustified hospital stay was performed on 155 paediatric inpatients and 248 controls, by applying pre-set criteria for hospitalization and comparing to results in previous studies. Results. Unjustified stay was decreased from 32.6% to 14.8% on the study ward, and from 25.7% to 19.3% on the control ward. The children on both wards did not differ significantly in rates of subsequent out of hospital mortality, re-admission, and the subjective evaluation of health by their parents one month following discharge. Conclusions. This study demonstrates that despite the fact that the per cent of unjustified HSD on a paediatric ward is much lower than on medicine or surgery, a significant reduction in unjustified stay can be achieved by intervention programme.