ABSTRACT
During the last years public Hospitals have experienced a progressive saturation. This has motivated the development of short stay medical units (SSMU) as an alternative to the traditional hospitalization. In our Hospital a SSMU begun to admit patients in April of 1994. During the rest of that year, 1814 were admitted to the unit with a mean hospital stay of 3.22 +/- 2.0 days. 68% of the patients were discharged and 32% were transferred to other units in the Hospital according to their diagnoses. 30% of the patients were seen in an external clinic, by the same medical staff, shortly after the discharge. Since the unit is functioning, the number of ectopic patients of the Department of Medicine decreased to a third and the mean hospital stay of all the medical patients decreased by 3.4 days. We consider that it is possible to achieve a short medical stay with the support of a swift external clinic. The SSMU also improved the allocation of the patients throughout the medical units, and contributed to mitigate the number of the ectopic patients.
Subject(s)
Hospital Units , Length of Stay/statistics & numerical data , Evaluation Studies as Topic , Female , Humans , Male , SpainABSTRACT
Vascular manifestations on Behçet's disease (BD) vary from 25 to 65% according to different series. Affects both arteries as veins, but superficial thrombophlebitis is the most frequent disorder. Disorders with higher morbidity like deep venous thrombosis, and arterial aneurisms can appear, even in the lungs. In our series of 30 patients we found an incidence of 46% of vascular manifestations, mainly (92%) superficial thrombophlebitis. We highlight the presence of a femoral aneurism, which was resected, and discuss its evolution and response to treatment with prednisone and cyclophosphamide. We review in-depth the vascular manifestations in the Spanish and International scientific literature, paying special interest to aneurism dilatations.
