When asking how many hospitals in the us there are a few factors that you have to look at.
First, you have to decide if you want to know the overall number of hospitals or if you want to know the number of specific kinds of hospitals. There are community hospitals, government hospitals, private hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, and even state run hospitals. So when you ask how many hospitals in the us you first have to ask the question of what kind? The easy answer of how many hospitals in the us is according to the American Hospital Association, in 2009 with all the different kinds of hospitals combined there are a total of 5,795 hospitals in the us. Of those over 5,000 are community hospitals. These hospitals are going to be the ones you are most familiar with. They are the ones that are in your local town or city that you may go to when you are sick or injured. There are around 200 government hospitals which are usually found near bases and other military instillations. There are over 115 long term care hospitals that deal with patients who are terminally ill or will be needing care of an extended period of time. For psychiatric patients there are around 450 hospitals. This may not seem like much but if you think that there are only fifty states that is on average 6-7 per state.When trying to really evaluate how many hospitals in the us another statistic you can look at is the number of available beds in all the hospitals.
Not all hospitals have hundreds or thousands of beds. Some small private hospitals may only have 50-100 beds total…yet still is considered a hospital. All hospital kinds combined there are just under 950,000 hospital beds in the the us. So now that you know how many hospitals in the us you may be wondering how many people are seen by all these hospitals. In 2009 throughout all the hospitals in the us there were 37.5 million people admitted into the hospital. Of this number 35 million were admitted at local hospitals like the one in your local town. If you do the math that means roughly 1 out of every 12 people will be admitted into the hospital each year. That is not to bad of odds. So as you can see when you ask the question how many hospitals in the us you really have to dig a little bit further to really find the true answer. You could say there are just under 6,000 hospitals in the us, but I believe it is more interested to truly look at all the different kinds of hospitals and the kinds of people that are treated at them each year. These statistics are released every year by the AHA so it will be interesting to see how many hospitals in the us there are this year!For more information on how many hospitals in the us and other great topics please check out our database page.