Tuesday occupancy is a poor guide to Sunday night
A medical ward that looks calm on a Tuesday extract can still have been blocked on Sunday evening. The weekday you happen to export is not the week.
Most occupancy files we are handed in Tbilisi are a Tuesday or Wednesday snapshot. That is when the information office has time, and when a director asks for “current occupancy” ahead of Thursday’s meeting. The file is not dishonest. It is simply the wrong hour of the week to describe the building.
On a medical ward, Tuesday mid-morning often looks orderly: elective returns have been placed, the weekend’s emergency admissions have been sorted into bays, and two discharges have already left. Sunday night is a different census. Emergency admissions have arrived without a matching number of discharges. The day room has a trolley. The occupancy extract from Tuesday does not contain that trolley.
When we draw a week rather than a day, the pattern is usually ugly and useful. Occupancy peaks after the weekend. It dips after Wednesday’s planned discharges. A board that only ever sees the dip will keep asking why the corridor “feels” worse than the paper.
Delayed discharge makes the distortion worse. A patient marked medically ready on Friday who cannot leave until Monday still occupies a bed through the peak. If “medically ready” is kept in a notebook and never joins the occupancy file, Tuesday’s extract will not show why the bed was unavailable on Sunday.
We ask hosts for seven consecutive midnights, not for the nicest day. If midnight is not recorded, we say so and refuse to shade a night we did not see. A hole in the drawing is better than a calm Tuesday pretending to be the week.