You can use a new internet tool to predict how much time you will spend in hospital depending to your current lifestyle, thanks to some researchers in Toronto.
The biggest factors that will make a difference are whether you smoke, what you eat, how active you are and whether you drink alcoholic beverages. The calculator asks a total of 20 questions on these subjects as well as other basics like age and sex.
“We estimated that about one-third of the people in hospital in Canada are there because of their unhealthy living,” says Dr. Douglas Manuel, senior scientist at the Ottawa Hospital of Research Institute. “It adds up to billions and billions of dollars for us because hospital care is one of the most expensive and largest parts of our health care system.”
Smoking affects hospital stays and duration
Smoking is still the biggest factor in hospital stays, even though tobacco use has gone down in Canada and is about the lowest in the world. Smoking causes a lot of illness, but it also affects people with unrelated illnesses.
“So if you’re in hospital to get your knee replaced, you’re going to be more likely to have infections or complications afterwards,” explains Manuel. “So really these health behaviours affect not only your likelihood of going to hospital, but then how you’ll fare or how long you’ll be in hospital.”
After studying 900,000 days of hospital stays between 2001 and 2012 in the province of Ontario, researchers found 32 per cent could be attributed to smoking, physical inactivity, poor diet and unhealthy alcohol consumption. Only 7.2 per cent of involved no health risks.
Calculator should spur discussion
Manuel doesn’t expect people to take the test and then change their lives. “It’s more, do the calculator and then let’s have a discussion about how we can make those changes easy for everyone.”
Still, after taking the test, Manuel and his group prefer to hold their meetings as they walk outdoors, since being active is one of the factors that can reduce the amount of time they can expect to spend in hospital.
Accompanying the hospital stay calculator is another that can calculate overall life expectancy.
Immigrants healthier upon arrival
And an interesting side note: Immigrants generally are healthy people and so, have a longer life expectancy and can expect shorter hospital stays. But that effect wears off the longer they are in Canada. So, both calculators ask whether the respondents were born in Canada, and if not, when they came to this country.
For reasons beyond our control, and for an undetermined period of time, our comment section is now closed. However, our social networks remain open to your contributions.