Northern Cape

Hospital Activity for the period April to October 2000

Background

The data used in this report has been provided by the Northern Cape Provincial Health Department. The data was submitted as part of the nationally agreed minimum data set reporting process. There are some gaps in the minimum data set provided by the Northern Cape, so the data reported is not complete or final.

Regional hospitals

The Northern Cape has one designated regional hospital - Kimberley Hospital. The key indicators for this hospitals are listed below. Data for the indicators relating to live and still births is not yet available for this Hospital.

Table 1: Indicators in Kimberley Hospital

The usable bed utilisation rate (bed occupancy rate) at Kimberley Hospital is about 80%, and the length of stay 6.5 days. In an acute hospital, this length of stay is relatively high.

The Cesarean Section rate at Kimberley Hospital shows that nearly one in four births are delivered by cesarean section. However, there may be a problem with the data here, as the data suggests that no assisted deliveries occur at Kimberley.

District Hospitals

Average length of stay

Graph 1: Length of stay in district hospitals

Bed utilisation

It is difficult to interpret the bed utilisation data. Calculating bed utilisation rates for the useable beds in a hospital means that it should be impossible to achieve rates of over 100%, unless this reflects patients lying on the floor. However, four hospitals in Northern Cape have registered utilisation rates of over 100%.

Graph 2: Bed utilisation rates in district hospitals

Excluding these four hospitals, bed utilisation rates are between 70% and 90% in most of the district hospitals in Northern Cape. However there are 4 hospitals (Warrenton, Garies, Victoria West and Hopetown) which had bed utilisation rates of between 44% and 54%.

Maternity and neonatal indicators

For these indicators there is a lot of missing data, and seven hospitals have not submitted any data on cesarean sections. For those hospitals that have submitted data, some of it looks suspicious as there are some very wide variations between months for the same hospital. Nevertheless, it is clear that some hospitals have very high rates for a district hospital, given that one would expect that booked pregnant women with an expected complicated delivery would be referred to a regional hospital.

Graph 3: Cesarean Section rates by hospital

For still births, the data is also far from complete. Some of the data will require checking but even on the data available it is clear that some hospitals have a still birth rate that is above acceptable norms. More than half of the hospitals reporting data (i.e. 8 out of 14) had a still birth rate of more than 5%.

Community Health Centres

The Northern Cape Province has collected the hospital minimum data set for its community health centres.

The data indicates that the efficiency of CHCs is worse than in district hospitals.

Graph 4: Number of CHCs by bed utilisation rates (%)

As seen in the chart opposite, half of the CHCs have bed utilisation rates of below 40%, which questions the viability of some of these facilities. Most of the CHCs have a length of stay of less then 2 days, which is reasonable for a this type of facility. However Canarvon CHC has an average stay of nearly 5 days, which is difficult to explain.

Specialist Hospitals

West End TB Hospital is a lot larger than Upington TB Hospital, with 180 beds compared to just 37. The length of stay in these two hospital is also very different – 84 days at West End compared to 36 at Upington. Why are these lengths of stay so different? At West End Psychiatric Hospital the average stay is over 3 months which is very long for hospital care. All three specialist hospitals have a bed utilisation rate of between 60 and 70%, which is low considering the length of stay and type of patient.

Andy Burn
22 February 2001