DATA ANALYSIS
Crime Rates
Raw crime levels do not provide much context, particularly given the varying sizes of the hospitals across the United States and Canada. To provide context, the survey collected surrogate indicators of hospital size including:
- Square Feet – all interior space on the campus including on-campus clinics, research space, medical office buildings, etc. It did not include parking lots, parking garages, and other exterior spaces.
- Average Daily Census – calculated as Total Inpatient Days / 365.
- Hospital Beds
These surrogate indicators allow for calculation of crimes rates and provide context not only to the current Crime Survey, but will also provide context to future Crime Surveys when different (hopefully more) hospitals respond to the Crime Survey.
Based on a review of the data, it appears that Average Daily Census was not a commonly understood security metric or was not readily available to the security professionals responding to the survey. As such, Average Daily Census was not used as an indicator of size in our analysis. We were able to analyze hospital crimes and provide context based on bed count and square feet; however, the data tracks consistently for both surrogate indicators of size. Of the 242 responses, 85% (n=206) provided bed counts. The graphs below illustrate the crime rate trends for 2012 to 2013 per 100 beds for Canada and the US.
Canadian Hospitals
