- Admitted patient: A patient who undergoes a hospital's formal admission process to receive treatment and/or care. This treatment and/or care is provided over a period of time and can occur in hospital and/or in the person's home (for hospital-in-the home patient).
- Admitted patient care consists of the following categories:
- - Acute care
- Rehabilitation care
- Palliative care
- Geriatric evaluation and management
- Psycho-geriatric care
- Maintenance care
- Newborn care
- Other care is where the principal clinical intent does not meet the criteria for any of above, which can be on of the followings:
- Organ procurement: posthumous
- Hospital boarder
- Average length of stay: the average number of patient days for admitted patient episode.
- Episode of care: the period of admitted patient care between a formal or statistical admission and a formal or statistical separation, characterised by only one care type.
- Separation: the term used to refer an episode of care for an admitted patient, which can be a total hospital stay (from admission to discharge, transfer or death), or a portion of a hospital stay beginning or ending in a change of type of care (for example, from acute to rehabilitation). A separations also means the process by which an admitted patient completes an episode of care either by being discharged, dying, transferring to another hospital or changing type of care.
For each separation, patients are assigned a principal diagnosis which is usually a disease, injury or poisoning, but can also by specific treatment of an already diagnosed condition, such as dialysis for kidney disease, or other reasons for hospitalisation.
Patients can have more than one hospital separation.
For other useful information on hospitalisation related definitions and statistics see AIHW publication Australian Hospital Statistics 2002-03.