Hospitals

Practices and procedures in Canada's hospitals changed considerably over the course of the 1990s. As advances in care shortened both treatment and recovery times, the number of beds available for short-term care decreased, admissions for overnight stays declined and the average length of stay fell.

From 1995/96 to 1999/2000, 275 hospitals closed, merged or changed to provide other care. The number of nights spent in acute care hospitals fell 10% between 1995/96 and 2000/01. Meanwhile, the use of day surgery increased by 20%. Still, in 2000/01, acute care hospitals provided 21 million days of care, or an average of 7.2 days per patient.

Most acute care hospital beds were used for childbirth and for the treatment of seniors. The main users of hospitals today are seniors. In 1997/98, despite representing only 12% of the population, people aged 65 and over accounted for 35% of the 3 million discharges from acute care hospitals.

In 1996/97, 5.3 million injured or acutely ill Canadians aged 12 and over visited hospital emergency rooms. However, such visits declined from a high of 669 per 1,000 people in 1987/88 to 433 per 1,000 in 1995/96. Partly, the decline can be traced to the closure of some hospital emergency rooms; it can also be attributed to the opening of urgent care centres and walk-in clinics.

Men aged 55 to 64 were least likely to use emergency services, whereas women aged 25 to 44 and men aged 75 and over used emergency services more frequently.