a wordLength of stay
also: LOS · ward nights · inpatient days · bed days
Hospitals abroad quote nights. Statisticians count days. A package that says three nights is describing a plan, not a measurement.
How long a patient occupies a hospital bed. On a price page it is a number of nights the seller has budgeted for; in a health statistic it is a measured average across discharges. The first is a forecast and the second is a result, and the word does not distinguish them.
First seen. 1520s for the noun stay
Nights and days are not the same count everywhere, so the rule has to be named. The OECD counts a stay as the date of discharge minus the date of admission, which makes it a count of nights: admitted on the 25th and discharged on the 26th is one. Cited · etymonline-stay
The story Cited
On a package the number is a boundary. Bumrungrad's knee package names three nights in the surgical ward and excludes "nights beyond 3, and any ICU"; its hip package names four. Both figures are what the hospital has priced, not what a given knee will need. A fourth night is not a complication in the clinical sense and is still a bill.
The statistical version counts something else. The OECD calculates average length of stay by dividing bed-days by discharges, counting a stay as "the date of discharge minus the date of admission", and excludes day cases from the measure entirely — while counting as inpatient discharges "[p]atients admitted as day-care patients but who have been retained overnight due to complication". The unplanned night is exactly the event that moves an episode from one category to the other.
Trade practice — the trade quotes the stay twice over and means different things each time: nights in the ward, and then days in the country before the surgeon will sign a fitness-to-fly note. The second number is longer than the first, and it is the one that sets the hotel bill, the companion's leave and the changeable fare.
Inference — a short published stay is also a selling point, which gives the number a direction. Nothing on a package page is audited against what the ward recorded.
How it works Inference
Three questions make a stay figure readable: whether the quoted number is nights or days and under whose rule; what a night past the package costs and whether that rate is published; and whether intensive care sits inside the count or outside it, which it usually does.
Today Cited
As of 17 September 2026 the stay figures on this site's procedure records are read off sellers' package pages and are labelled as such. National averages on the OECD definition measure discharges rather than packages, and the two cannot be substituted for one another.
The particulars
| region | Everywhere |
|---|---|
| confidence | high · updated 2026-09-17 |
What it connects to
Pages that point here
Sources
- stay (v.1), stay (n.3) — etymology — Online Etymology Dictionary, compiled by Douglas Harper · link (read 2026-09-17)
- Total Knee Replacement Surgery (Exclude implant) — package JOINT04 — Bumrungrad International Hospital · link (read 2026-09-16)
- Total Hip Replacement Surgery (Exclude implant) — package JOINT08 — Bumrungrad International Hospital · link (read 2026-09-16)
- Hospital discharges and average length of stay by diagnostic categories — definitions, sources and methods — OECD Health Statistics 2025 · link (read 2026-09-17)
Where it came from: Cited a source named here · Harvested pulled from an open dataset · Trade practice how the trade works, hedged · Inference this project's own reasoning · Field somebody stood there. This record as JSON.