Acute care is treatment for a short period of time for a brief but severe episode of illness. The term is generally associated with care rendered in an emergency department, ambulatory care clinic, or other short-term stay facility. The number of beds indicates the number of people who could concurrently receive these services. An important aspect of the current health care crisis in the US is the result of the growing need for acute care despite a decrease in the number of facilities which provide that care. This mismatch has resulted from the dramatic increase in the number of patients who are uninsured or underinsured, and therefore unable to pay for services rendered. Those patients often turn to emergency departments for their acute care needs. That has resulted in overcrowding and made it increasingly difficult to focus adequate resources on those patients who present with true emergencies.
Looking at numbers of professionals or facilities within a geographic area helps to focus on the availability of health care and its quality.
Data Source: Florida Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA)
Chart will display if there are at least three years of data.
Multi-year counts are a sum of the selected years, not an average.
Quartiles are calculated when data is available for at least 51 counties.
MOV - Measure of Variability: Probable range of values resulting from random fluctuations in the number of events. Not calculated when numerator is below 5 or denominator is below 20, or count or rate is suppressed. The MOV is useful for comparing rates to a goal or standard. For example, if the absolute difference between the county rate and the statewide rate is less than the MOV, the county rate is not significantly different from the statewide rate (alpha level = 0.05). When the absolute difference between the county rate and the statewide rate is greater than the MOV, the county rate is significantly different from the statewide rate. MOV should not be used to determine if the rates of two different counties, or the county rates for two different years, are statistically significantly different.
Denom - abbreviated for Denominator.
Population estimates are not available for persons whose county of residence is unknown. Given this, the denominator and associated rate are not available.
* - Indicates the county rate is statistically significantly different from the statewide rate.