So tomorrow is the University of Pennsylvania’s annual Day in the Life project, and we’re pretty excited. I’ve taken photos for two previous Day in the Life projects during my time here at Penn Medicine (you can find those here and here), and both times I’ve been amazed at the immensity of this institution. There are entire aspects of the day-to-day here that you’d probably never even think about, and Day in the Life helps provide some perspective. Hopefully my photography captures some of that scale, but I’ve taken photos on every floor of the Hospital at the University of Pennsylvania from the basement to the helipad, and I don’t feel ashamed to say I’ve still come nowhere near conveying just how much goes on here.
Where photographs fall short, we can always fall back on an old favorite: statistics! They’re not quite as exciting to look at, but they do tell quite a story. Thankfully, we’ve got a place where we keep some very relevant statistics all in one helpful bundle. It’s called Facts and Figures, and it’s handy in a pinch.
So, let’s break it down a bit. Last year, Penn Medicine had a total of 75,588 adult admissions, 2,164,567 outpatient visits, 137,987 emergency department visits, and 8,885 births. Obviously those don’t get spread equally throughout each day of the year, but it’s easy enough to use those numbers and figure out what an “average” day at Penn Medicine entails: 207 adult admissions, 5,930 outpatient visits, 378 emergency department visits, and 24 births. Try catching all of that on one camera.
On the subject of cameras, the iPhone 6 has a surprisingly powerful one. Using that and Instagram’s Hyperlapse app, I was able to wander around earlier today and capture some time-lapse footage from various Penn Medicine locations. It’s not perfect (I did MacGyver myself a handy little stability solution that involved my wallet, but maybe that’s a blog post for another time), but it was a fun little project and captured, in some sense, the regular hustle and bustle in our corner of Philly. Check it out, embedded below: