Report shows more Americans are having outpatient surgery.
USA Today reports, “More patients are having surgery without staying in the hospital overnight, and these ‘outpatient’ operations now make up two-thirds of all surgeries,” according to a report from the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The report shows that “the rate of visits to free-standing surgical centers tripled from 1996 to 2006, to 15 million surgeries and other procedures a year.” Comment, increasingly there is less need for beds in hospitals and less need to build new hospitals, except to replace technologically incapable institutions. More planning effort has to be placed on ambulatory services, But hospital activists keeping pushing legislators to fund bedded services.
