Evaluation of bed vacancy and occupancy times as governance parameters in patients admitted to a public intensive care unit

Abstract Objective: To evaluate the vacancy and occupancy times of intensive care unit beds; to analyze differences in these times between the day and night shifts and weekdays, weekends, and holidays; and to identify predictors of vacancy and occupancy times. Methods: This was a cross-sectional, observational, descriptive, analytical, inferential study. A total of 700 vacancy-to-occupancy records from 54 beds of an adult intensive care unit of a public hospital in Sergipe, Brazil, dated between January and December 2018 were analyzed. The nonparametric Mann-Whitney test was used for comparisons between groups. Several predictive models of length of stay were constructed. The incidence rate ratio was used to estimate the effect size. Results: During the study period, there were 13,477 requests for the 54 intensive care unit beds, and only 5% (700 patients) were granted. The vacancy-to-occupancy times were shorter when beds were occupied at night (incidence rate ratio of 0.658; 95%CI 0.550 - 0.787; p