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 and based on lessons learned during previous Healthcare Crime Surveys, the 2016 Healthcare Crime Survey collected bed counts for each hospital. As a surrogate indicator of hospital size, hospital beds allow for the calculation of crimes rates (per 100 beds) and provide the ability to trend crime rates over time and to compare this year’s Healthcare Crime Survey results to prior years.
It is important to remember that crime rates are used to provide context and allow for comparisons between hospitals of different sizes. Bed counts were used based on experience from prior crime surveys where additional size and population indicators were collected. That experience informed the decision to use bed counts as other indicators were more challenging to obtain and not consistently reported via the crime surveys.
U.S. Hospitals
The graphs below display the crime rate trends for 2012 to 2015 per 100 beds for U.S. hospitals.
