Although reducing length of stay is desirable to improve productivity, there may be a risk if length of stay are being reduced beyond a safe level. It would therefore be useful to see emergency readmission rate alongside length of stay for context.

When will this be available? It would be useful to have benchmarking information on new to follow up ratio’s by specialty.

While seeing the percentage of inpatients with an extended length of stay is useful it would also be able to see the absolute number of inpatients on which this is based as a decrease in percentage may be as a result of fluctuations in inpatient numbers rather than a change in performance

What I need to know is whether my pattern of variation is unusual or not. The national median will tend towards one because it is limited by a fixed bed capacity. Does every trust have the same pattern of variation over time and is it driven by the numerator or the denominator. I need to be able to see the discharges and admissions rather than just the ratio to make any sense of this data.

It would be helpful to know the standard shift start time (for Surgeons/Anaesthetists/Nurses) vs. theatre start time.

There is a metric in the Finance and Use of Resources compartment on pre-operative length of stay. It would be useful to see this broken down by specialty and added to the Inpatients compartment.

Define inpatient specialty by discharging specialty rather than diagnosis-dominant specialty