Patient outcomes and characteristics in sample hospital wards during analysis period
| Mean | SD | |
| Number of patients treated in the ward | 20.63 | 8.39 |
| Age | 64.14 | 9.78 |
| Female (%) | 0.46 | 0.18 |
| Non-white (%)* | 0.52 | 0.16 |
| Elixhauser Comorbidity Index score | 3.68 | 1.16 |
| Average length of hospital stay (days)† | 28.35 | 16.99 |
| In-hospital patient death (binary) | 0.062 | 0.241 |
| Death rate per 1000 patients | 3.51 | 16.06 |
| Observations | 19 287 | |
| Hospital wards | 53 | |
Unit of analysis is the hospital ward-day. Patient characteristics are weighted by the hours spent in the ward on the day in question.
*Non-white includes patients for whom ethnicity was recorded as unknown.
†Average length of stay is calculated here as the mean length of hospital stay among the patients treated by each team (ie, on each ward-day), in order to capture (one aspect of) the severity of those patients. A patient who stays in one hospital ward hospital for 10 days, for example, would be treated by 10 teams, and so their length of stay (10 days) would enter the mean value for 10 separate teams (appropriately, given that the patient’s severity affects the workload for each of those teams). In contrast, a patient who stayed in hospital for <1 day, under the care of a single team, would only have their length of stay (1 day) enter the mean value for one team. For this reason, patients with long stays are over-represented, which acts to increase the overall mean and this measure of average length of stay (with respect to the team) is therefore higher than and not comparable to the average length of stay for a patient.