Recent Statistics and Trends

Increasing Delays for Patient Transfers

Nearly 5,000 patients are transferred from other hospitals around West Virginia and surrounding states each year for treatment available only at WVU Hospitals. When our hospital is at capacity, these patients must wait longer for admission, or are instead sent to hospitals farther from their homes and families. The “hours on delay” statistics shown here demonstrate the increasing patient delays resulting from this situation – in 2011, the equivalent of 83 days.
 

Long-term Growth in Service
The number of people cared for at WVU Hospitals has increased steadily – nearly doubling since 1991. “Inpatient days” is a standard measure of hospital activity, counting each day that each individual patient stays in a hospital bed.




Hospital at Full Capacity
WVU Hospitals tracks how close we are to capacity by doing a patient headcount every night at midnight. A hospital like ours, with many patients arriving for treatment at all hours of the day or night, is considered to be operating at full capacity when the midnight census reaches about 85 percent. This leaves us about one-sixth of our beds open for new patients arriving in the morning, emergencies, and other expected admissions.





Employment Impact
WVU Healthcare is already one of West Virginia’s largest employers, with some 6,000 people on our payroll. This project will create about 750 new permanent jobs by 2016 if it is implemented on schedule. This chart shows the projected increase, both in terms of full time equivalent (FTE) positions and actual numbers of people working.





Emergency Department
The number of people requiring life-saving care in our emergency department has increased steadily. The number of patients whose conditions are so serious that they need to be admitted directly to the hospital has nearly doubled in the past 10 years.