Hospitals Week Aims to Help People ‘Know Your BHB’

Bermuda Hospitals Board today announces its first Hospitals Week in over 30 years, with the goal of helping provide data and information about the services it provides, how it operates and how well it performs.

A promotion ‘Know Your BHB!’ will run in the lobbies of the new Acute Care Wing and General Wing of KEMH and aims to provide facts and figures about a wide number of departments to give an insight into the volume and variety of work needed to keep Bermuda’s only hospitals running. Information includes the numbers of tests, surgeries and outpatient appointments, inpatient admissions average length of stays, top ten diagnoses in Emergency and the Inpatient Wards and the cost of Road Traffic Accidents on healthcare.

Later this week, year-end quality and patient satisfaction information will be released. This will the first public release of quality data, benchmarked against international hospitals, although patient satisfaction data has been released before.

CEO Mrs Venetta Symonds, says: “We want to move to regular reporting of information to the community about the work we do and how we perform. The displays provide data that shows length of stay has been improving for some time, but that the opening of the new ACW has helped even more. You can see that asthma is the most common reason people visit Emergency and the Urgent Care Centre, and how certain diseases, such as heart disease and diabetes, drive admissions into the hospital. It is a testament to a lot of hard work across all departments, from front line care to support and administrative services that ensure our hospitals keep running 24/7.”

Things you might not know about BHB:

• BHB has more than done its bit to contain rising healthcare costs – in fact, between 2012/13 and 2014/15, BHB revenues actually fell from $326.3m to $299.6m.

• Length of stay has dropped from 8.2 days in 2013/14 to 6.9 days at the end of 2014/15.

• Mental health teams made 1,806 home visits in 2014/15, had 1,936 follow-up outpatient appointments, 75 new outpatient referrals, 21 re-admissions to outpatients, 381 walk-in visits (unscheduled) and 602 clinic visits.

• 5,100 pounds of soiled linen is produced daily at BHB and over 2 million pounds of linen is cleaned each year in the BHB Laundry Department.

• There were 5,280 ambulance calls in 2014/15 – 85% of them were 911 calls and 15% of them were ‘routine transports’.

• There were 6,496 wound care treatments at KEMH in 2014/15, and 3,158 home visits by RNs who provide home-based wound care.

• Septicemia has the tenth highest number of cases (65 cases) on our acute care wards, but the highest average length of stay (21.0 days). This means it is the third highest diagnosis by total length of stay (1,363 days).

• Births at KEMH have dropped 25.4% in five years – from 759 in 2010 to 566 in 2014.

• Over the last five years, the total cost of caring for road traffic accident victims was over $15 million in Emergency and Urgent Care services, and $20 million in inpatient care services.

• Asthma was the number one diagnosis in Emergency and Urgent Care in 2014/15, although numbers compared to 2013 are slightly down (1,888 in 2014/15 compared to 1,986 in 2012/13).

Attachment 1: BHB Facts & Figures

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