Bermuda Hospitals Board has announced its first Hospitals Week in more than 30 years, with the goal of helping provide data and information about the services it provides, how it operates and how well it performs.

According to a press statement, ‘Know Your BHB!’ will run in the lobbies of the new Acute Care Wing and General Wing of KEMH and aims to give facts and figures about a wide number of departments to give an insight into the volume and variety of work needed to keep Bermuda’s only hospitals running.

Information includes the numbers of tests, surgeries and outpatient appointments, inpatient admissions average length of stays, top ten diagnoses in Emergency and the Inpatient Wards and the cost of Road Traffic Accidents on healthcare.

Later this week, year-end quality and patient satisfaction information will be released. This will the first public release of quality data, benchmarked against international hospitals, although patient satisfaction data has been released before.

CEO Venetta Symonds said: “We want to move to regular reporting of information to the community about the work we do and how we perform. The displays provide data that shows length of stay has been improving for some time, but that the opening of the new ACW has helped even more.

“You can see that asthma is the most common reason people visit Emergency and the Urgent Care Centre, and how certain diseases, such as heart disease and diabetes, drive admissions into the hospital. It is a testament to a lot of hard work across all departments, from front line care to support and administrative services that ensure our hospitals keep running 24/7.”