Daily Census

The daily census is taken at the same moment each day, traditionally midnight, and counts patients currently admitted. Alongside it sit the day's admissions, discharges, transfers in and transfers out. Occupied bed-days, occupancy rate, average length of stay and turnover are all derived from this series; none of them can be computed without it.

Why it matters in a hospital

Because everything downstream depends on it, a census taken inconsistently quietly corrupts months of statistics. The classic errors are counting a patient admitted and discharged the same day as zero bed-days, and taking the count at different times on different days. Neither is visible in the resulting numbers — they simply come out slightly wrong, and stay wrong. Agreeing the census moment and the same-day-discharge rule in writing is worth more than any amount of later analysis.

How Trisvio handles it

Trisvio derives the census from admission and discharge records rather than asking a ward to report a number, so the series is consistent by construction and a retrospective correction to an admission flows through to the statistics built on it.