Understanding the contribution of general medical services to acute inpatient care in Victorian public hospitals

To utilise the Victorian Department of Health's administrative dataset for hospital admissions to evaluate the relative contribution and trends over time of general medical services to acute multiday inpatient hospital separations in the Victorian public healthcare system.A retrospective time-series study of general medical activity compared to other major specialties using hospital-level data provided by the Department of Health: (i) extrapolation from diagnosis-related group (DRG) activity data (2011-2021) and, (ii) directly reported discharge unit-based activity (available from 2018).All metropolitan and rural Victorian public hospitals.Acute multiday separations of all patients aged ≥18 years.Using the DRG-based data, general medicine ranked as the largest care provider of all specialties studied, accounting for 12.1% of separations. Despite the largest increase at a rate of 2,831 separations/year (0.336%/year of total, p0.001) compared to others, mean length of stay declined by 0.08 days/year (p0.001). These findings were significant for metropolitan and rural hospitals. The use of directly reported discharge unit-based data also ranked general medicine as the largest care provider accounting for 32.9% of total separations, with rural hospital general medical services contributing nearly 50% of all multiday separations.Both DRG-based data and discharge unit-based data indicate that general medicine is the largest provider of acute multiday inpatient care in Victorian hospitals. The estimate of contribution of general medicine differed between the two datasets as DRG data likely over-represents the role of other specialties possibly due to assumptions regarding specialty management of varying groups of diagnoses. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.