Prolonged hospital stays in elderly surgical patients are primarily driven by postoperative morbidity rather than social or administrative factors.
May support targeting postoperative morbidity to reduce prolonged elderly surgical stays; hypothesis-generating pending randomized confirmation.
In a prospective study of patients aged 65 years and over admitted to a general surgical unit only one patient in 10 remained in hospital for more than a month and fewer than one patient in a hundred became a "bed-blocker." While the over-65s had mean and median durations of stay which were longer than those of younger patients, in almost all cases a prolonged stay in hospital resulted from postoperative morbidity and was not related to social or administrative factors. Only a reduction in the incidence of postoperative morbidity could achieve a significant saving in the number of bed-days occupied by elderly people.
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Seymour et al. (1982) studied this question.
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