Letter from the Chief Medical Officer
Dear Colleagues:
Brigham and Women’s Hospital truly has grown into an awesome center for delivering high-quality patient care, educating the next generation of care providers and pursuing ground-breaking research. A look back at the last fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, 2007, tells us the story through the numbers.
The statistics related to our delivery of care are overwhelming. We have 747 inpatient beds, including 27 beds licensed to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. At the close of the last fiscal year, our average length of stay was 5.0 days and our bed occupancy rate averaged 90.1 percent. Clearly, we are busier than most given that the average occupancy rate at 500-plus bed hospitals is about 75 percent, and for large hospitals, an 85 percent occupancy rate is considered busy.
Our ambulatory activity, admissions and procedural volumes detail another chapter of this narrative. Last year, we had 45,424 admissions and 8,399 births, and we performed more than 30,000 inpatient and outpatient surgical procedures—or nearly 600 per week. Our Emergency Department received 57,215 visits, and our Clinical Pathology Department completed 1.7 million labs.
The growth continues with the Carl J. and Ruth Shapiro Cardiovascular Center coming online. We immediately have a net gain of 30 new beds, and 50 when we’re completely up and running. The 16 new ORs in Shapiro, coupled with some of our older and smaller ORs coming offline, bring us to a total of 44. In terms of square footage, the Shapiro Center brings us to a total 1.16 million square feet in our distributed campus, and with the Foxborough ambulatory care center, we’ll bring another 75,000 square feet online in the coming year.
Our square footage totals and inpatient and outpatient data tell only a fraction of the story. We have more than 2,200 active and affiliate staff physicians, approximately 650 residents, more than 250 clinical fellows and more than 900 research fellows. Our BWH nurses, who are at the bedside 24-7 and play vital roles in our ambulatory practices, number more than 3,000.
Thankfully, we have the most capable and dedicated community of care providers and support staff—totaling more than 15,000—to make this all work.