Determining the Factors Related to the Duration of Hospitalization in the Intensive Care Unit of Neurosurgery

The length of hospital stay is an important indicator that can be useful for financial and management planning of hospitals. If patients who are going to stay in the hospital for a long time can be identified immediately after admission, Appropriate resources can be made available to try to speed up health care right from the start. Therefore, due to aging and on the other hand, the long queue for using ICU beds, the present study was conducted to determine the factors related to the length of stay of patients in the neurosurgery ICU of Loghman Hakim Hospital.

This is a retrospective descriptive study. The studied samples were extracted from 543 computer files of patients admitted to the ICU of Neurosurgery of Loghman Hakim Hospital affiliated to Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences in the period 2016-2017. Then, using Spss software version 25, the relationship between each of the variables and the length of stay was analyzed using the chi-square test.

Based on the results of the study, the statistical population consisted of 543 patients with a mean age of 18.07±43.34, including 42.4% female and 57.6% male. The mean length of stay was 5/86±6/33days and the factors related to the length of stay of the 15 variables included: diagnosis, hypertension, type of surgery and postoperative complications: pneumonia, meningitis, epilepsy.

Using the information obtained from the analysis of the patient length of stay in hospitals, the goal of better allocation of resources and hospital beds and optimal productivity of existing beds can be achieved. According to the findings of this study and by better identifying and managing factors related to length of stay, the length of stay index can be improved and steps can be taken to reduce costs and waste resources.