Day hospitals for the elderly: utilisation and performance

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Abstract
An attempt was made to compare the relative utilisation and performance of seven day hospitals for the elderly by retrospective examination of the records of 557 patients attending at the time of the study and 699 patients who had attended during the previous six months. ‘Good’ performance was measured in terms of ‘intermediate outcomes’ such as proportion of social cases attending, throughput, length of stay, occupancy, visits per week, number of readmissions and discharge destination. The most important problems associated with achieving ‘good’ utilisation and performance were sources of referral to the day hospitals and the proportion of patients classified as social cases in each day hospital. It is proposed that consideration should be given to the establishment of a scientifically-designed controlled trial of the costs and effectiveness of day hospital care against other alternatives, including day centres, intensive domiciliary support, outpatient visits and inpatient care.

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