Table 1.

Hospital and intensive care unit characteristics

Variable	Definition	Survey Days (n = 117)	Nonsurvey Days (n = 60)	P Value*
ICU characteristics
APACHE III score	Mean of admission APACHE III scores of all MICU patients as a measure of daily overall acuity	70.9 (20.5)	70.2 (17.7)	0.50
MICU census	Number of patients spending at least 2 hours on the MICU service during the calendar day	28 (26–30)	27 (25–29)	0.02
MICU admissions	Number of new admissions to the MICU	5 (4–7)	5 (3–6)	0.12
Days with nonmedical discharges, n (%)	Number of days with patients discharged to nonmedical general wards	10 (8)	5 (8)	0.94
Transfer requests	Number of accepted patient transfer requests from an outside facility	0 (0–1)	0 (0–1)	0.83
Transfer summary, n (%)	Categorical variable for ability to accept scheduled transfers
	No scheduled transfers	59 (50)	32 (53)
	All scheduled transfers occurred	22 (19)	9 (15)
	One or more scheduled transfers did not occur	36 (31)	19 (32)
Hospital characteristics
Medical ward census†	Number of patients on all general medical wards	234 (227–240)	213 (203–222)	<0.001
Nonmedical ward census	Number of medical patients on all nonmedical general wards	6 (3–9)	6 (3–9)	0.91
Emergency department census	Number of patients registered in emergency department	49 (43–53)	43.5 (38–48.5)	<0.001
Transition unit census	Number of patients admitted to transition unit (observation unit)	32 (29–35)	26.5 (21.5–30)	<0.001
Other ICU census	Number of patients admitted to any other hospital ICU	82 (78–85)	70 (66.5–75)	<0.001

Definition of abbreviations: APACHE = Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation; ICU = intensive care unit; MICU = medical ICU.

All results are presented as median (IQR) except where noted. All census variables were defined as the number of patients admitted to the respective unit for at least 2 hours during the calendar day.

^*P values reflect comparison of survey and nonsurvey days, using the Wilcoxon rank-sum test.

^†The medical wards have a total of 205 beds.