ABSTRACT
Treatments of many illnesses require patients to stay in hospital for a numbers of days, weeks or even months. Owing to the large number of inpatients that hospitals are expected to deal with, there is always an issue over the availability of hospital beds. In a particular large hospital an administrator is concerned that she will not have enough beds to cope with all the patients that are scheduled to be admitted over the coming months. In order to assess the current situation and put in place any contingency plans that might be necessary, she decides that it would be useful to know what the ‘typical’ length of stay was of an inpatient in her hospital. How might the administrator go about fi nding this typical value?
