the decrease in the number of hospital beds per 1000 inhabitants from 1975 until 1994, This limitation of hospital beds initiated a trend towards substitution of hospital care to other forms of care.
Screen 34 (trends in substitution: grafiek)
In this diagram you see different trends. You can see that the number of admissions to hospitals has not changed very much over the years. The reason is that on the one hand people are not as easily admitted to hospitals as in former years which leads to a decrease in admission rate. On the other hand the elderly population is growing steadily, bringing with them their health care problems. This raises the number of admissions. The outcome is that there is no real change in the number of hospital admittances over the years. The average lenght of hospital stay, however, is steadily declining from 16,5 days in 1972 to 9.5 days in 1994. This means that the overall number of hospital nursing days is declining. You can also see that from 1986 on the number of patients that receive day care is growing steadily. The same goes for the number of patients that visit the outpatient department or OPD. I did not receive the figures before 1986, but from that year on you see a rise in OPD-visits. There were no data available on the number of clients that receive home care in the same period. But the figures from the last few years show that this number is also growing.
At this point I would like to finish the subject of hospital care. While speaking about hospital care we have been looking at the organization and at the budget system. After that we saw some trends in hospital care: the decrease of inpatient hospital care and the rise of day care, visits at the outpatient department and home care. When talking about the decrease of hospital care and the substitution to other forms of care, we approach the subject of home care.
