health policy Health policy can be defined as the "decisions, plans, and actions that are undertaken to achieve specific healthcare goals within a society".World Health Organization''Health Policy'' accessed 22 March 2011(archived 5 February 2011) According ...

, Roemer's law may be expressed as "in an insured population, a hospital bed built is a bed filled." The rule was deduced by the American health services researcher Milton Roemer, working at the

UCLA School of Public Health The UCLA Jonathan and Karin Fielding School of Public Health is the graduate school of public health at UCLA, and is located within the Center for Health Sciences building on UCLA's campus in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. ...

. Roemer and colleagues found a

positive correlation In statistics, correlation or dependence is any statistical relationship, whether causal or not, between two random variables or bivariate data. Although in the broadest sense, "correlation" may indicate any type of association, in statisti ...

between the number of short-term

general hospital ''General Hospital'' (often abbreviated as ''GH'') is an American daytime television soap opera created by Frank and Doris Hursley which has been broadcast on American Broadcasting Company, ABC since April 1, 1963. Originally a half-hour seria ...

beds available per 1,000 population and the number of hospital days used per 1,000 population. Roemer's law will clearly not always hold true (not every bed that is ever built will be filled), but it provides the underpinning for

certificate of need A certificate of need (CON), in the United States, is a legal document required in many states and some federal jurisdictions before proposed creations, acquisitions, or expansions of healthcare facilities are allowed. CONs are issued by a federal ...

laws and for health planning. The law is thought to be a consequence of

induced demand In economics, induced demand – related to latent demand and generated demandSchneider, Benjamin (September 6, 2018"CityLab University: Induced Demand"'' CityLab'' – is the phenomenon whereby an increase in supply results in a decline ...

: physicians encouraging patients to consume services that the patients would not have chosen if they had been fully informed. Health planning and certificate of need laws aim to prevent the waste that would otherwise occur because of Roemer's law. "One problem in this finding is that it could be the case that hospital stays are shorter in lower hospital bed

per capita ''Per capita'' is a Latin phrase literally meaning "by heads" or "for each head", and idiomatically used to mean "per person". Social statistics The term is used in a wide variety of social science, social sciences and statistical research conte ...

regions because of a deficit in

supply Supply or supplies may refer to: *The amount of a resource that is available **Supply (economics), the amount of a product which is available to customers **Materiel, the goods and equipment for a military unit to fulfill its mission *Supply, as ...

(

reverse causation The phrase "correlation does not imply causation" refers to the inability to legitimately deduce a cause-and-effect relationship between two events or variables solely on the basis of an observed association or correlation between them. The idea ...

). An increased number of beds may be due to patient preference for

in-patient A patient is any recipient of health care services that are performed by healthcare professionals. The patient is most often ill or injured and in need of treatment by a physician, nurse, optometrist, dentist, veterinarian, or other health ...

(rather than

outpatient A patient is any recipient of health care services that are performed by healthcare professionals. The patient is most often ill or injured and in need of treatment by a physician, nurse, optometrist, dentist, veterinarian, or other healt ...

) care in a region."

Enoch Powell John Enoch Powell (16 June 19128 February 1998) was a British politician, scholar and writer. He served as Member of Parliament (United Kingdom), Member of Parliament (MP) for Wolverhampton South West for the Conservative Party (UK), Conserv ...

, the British Minister of Health, propounded a similar proposition, which he called Parkinson's law of hospital beds: "the number of patients always tends to equality with the number of beds available for them to lie in."

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Roemer's law Health economics Health policy