LOS

See: Length of stay under Indicator Definitions.

For our purposes, LOS (length of stay) is the combined number of days a patient spent on units on which we collect data. It is not the amount of time spent in the hospital as we don't have access to hospital admit/discharge data. Ward LOS and ICU LOS are included in our monthly, quarterly and annual reports.

• LOS = Discharge Date/Time – Admit Date/Time.

For example:

• Admit Date/Time: 20 May 2008 11:30
• Discharge Date/Time: 21 May 2008 17:45
• LOS = 1.260 (3 decimal digit accuracy is used for individual patients, 1 digit for averages)

different kinds of LOSs

• Allan and Julie met March 12, 2014 and identifed the different types of LOS currently calculated and reported and assigned a name to each one accordingly. There will be more to be added once when we receive the WRHA data on Hospital Admission and Discharge Dates in the near future.
  • LOS_Record - refers as the Length of Stay per record
    • simply calculated as the difference between Discharge and Admit Dates of each record. A record can be either a Medicine Ward or ICU patient.
  • LOS_Cum_Wards_Hosp - refers as Within Hospital Medicine Ward Cumulative LOS
    • this is the sum of all Medicine wards' LOS_Record within one Hospital admission per hospital. It is important to determine correctly the different wards the patient stayed within a hospital admission and this is done by using the time gaps between records and the locations the patient came from and went to. If a patient stayed in more than one Medicine wards during his hospital admission until he was left the hospital, then all his wards' LOS_Record were added.
  • LOS_Elapse_Ward1_Hosp - refers to the length of stay from the first ward admission until the last discharge date during one hospital admission per hospital.
    • First, identify the first ward the patient stayed and the last ward or ICU unit the patient stayed during a given hospital admission per hospital.
    • Then calculate the difference between the LAST Discharge Date and the First Admit Date as the elapse LOS.
    • If the patient has prior stay in ICU before the first ward stay, the prior ICU stay is not included.
  • LOS_ICU_Region - refers to the length of continuous stay in one or more ICU on same or different hospital in the region
    • First, identify the patient who had tranferred to another ICU/OR/Recovery area on same of different hosp within 48 hours and consider their ICU stays as continuous ICU stay.
    • Then calculate the difference between the Discharge Date of the last ICU stay and the Admit Date of the First ICU stay.

Legacy

• resuscitated patients with a short LOS used to be ignored, Category:Arrest
• LOS vs TISS LOS - TISS76-2 hour rule used to mean that # of TISS days might be different than LOS. This is no longer the case as of TISS28.