As hospital sizes vary considerably, the number of beds is a better indicator of the availability of hospital services than is the number of hospitals. However, the range and types of patients that different hospitals treat (or their 'casemix') can affect the comparability of hospital bed numbers. Hospitals with different casemixes will have differing proportions of beds available for specialised and more general purposes.
Beds counted are those available for use—with appropriate staffing. The counts are not of actual physical beds, as not all may be in use. Chairs used for some same-day treatments such as chemotherapy are also included.
In 2010–11, there were:
- 55,789 beds in public acute hospitals
- 1,983 beds in public psychiatric hospitals
- 2,822 beds in private free-standing day hospitals (based on 2009–10 data, ABS 2011)
- 24,926 beds in other private hospitals (based on 2009–10 data, ABS 2011).
The number of hospital beds increased by 2.5% between 2006–07 (82,582 beds) and 2009–10 (84,648 beds), an annual average increase of less than 1%.
There was a relatively large decrease for public psychiatric hospitals over this period, reflecting the continuation of the long-term trend to deinstitutionalise services for people with mental illness, and the trend to integrate specialist psychiatric services with public acute care hospital services.