Hospital closure in the United States, 1976-1980: a descriptive overview.

This paper is an overview of hospital closure in the United States for the five-year period 1976-1980. We describe the distributional patterns of closings among noncommunity and community hospitals classified according to institutional characteristics such as bed size, control, and location. We also examine the ten percent of community hospitals operating at the beginning of the period which were shown to have combined institutional characteristics strongly associated with closure via a method of regression analysis.