665,876 research outputs found
Waiting lists, waiting times and admissions: an empirical analysis at hospital and general practice level
We report an empirical analysis of the responses of the supply and demand for
secondary care to waiting list size and waiting times. Whereas previous empirical
analyses have used data aggregated to area level, our analysis is novel in that it
focuses on the supply responses of a single hospital and the demand responses of the
GP practices it serves, and distinguishes between outpatient visits, inpatient
admissions, daycase treatment and emergency admissions. The results are plausible
and in line with the theoretical model. For example: the demand from practices for
outpatient visits is negatively affected by waiting times and distance to the hospital.
Increases in waiting times and waiting lists lead to increases in supply; the supply of
elective inpatient admissions is affected negatively by current emergency admissions
and positively by lagged waiting list and waiting time. We use the empirical results to
investigate the dynamic responses to one off policy measures to reduce waiting times
and lists by increasing supply
The demand for private health insurance: do waiting lists or waiting times matter? CHERE Working Paper 2010/8
Besley, Hall, and Preston (1999) estimated a model of the demand for private health insurance in Britain as a function of regional waiting lists and found that increases in the number of people waiting for more than 12 months (the long-term waiting list) increased the probability of insurance purchase. In the absence of waiting time data, the length of regional long-term waiting lists was used to capture the price-quality trade-off of public treatment. We revisit Besley et al.?s analysis using Australian data and test the use of waiting lists as a proxy for waiting time in models of insurance demand. Unlike Besley et al., we find that the long-term waiting list is not a significant determinant of the demand for insurance. However we find that long waiting times do significantly increase insurance. This suggests that the relationship between waiting times and waiting lists is not as straightforward as is commonly assumed.waiting time, waiting lists, health insurance, regional aggregation
Reconciliation of Waiting Time Statistics of Solar Flares Observed in Hard X-Rays
We study the waiting time distributions of solar flares observed in hard
X-rays with ISEE-3/ICE, HXRBS/SMM, WATCH/GRANAT, BATSE/CGRO, and RHESSI.
Although discordant results and interpretations have been published earlier,
based on relatively small ranges ( decades) of waiting times, we find that
all observed distributions, spanning over 6 decades of waiting times ( hrs), can be reconciled with a single distribution
function, , which
has a powerlaw slope of at large waiting times ( hrs) and flattens out at short waiting times \Delta t \lapprox
\Delta t_0 = 1/\lambda_0. We find a consistent breakpoint at hours from the WATCH, HXRBS, BATSE, and RHESSI data.
The distribution of waiting times is invariant for sampling with different flux
thresholds, while the mean waiting time scales reciprocically with the number
of detected events, . This waiting time
distribution can be modeled with a nonstationary Poisson process with a flare
rate that varies as . This flare rate distribution represents a highly
intermittent flaring productivity in short clusters with high flare rates,
separated by quiescent intervals with very low flare rates.Comment: Preprint also available at
http://www.lmsal.com/~aschwand/eprints/2010_wait.pd
A model for phenotype change in a stochastic framework
some species, an inducible secondary phenotype will develop some time after the environmental change that evokes it. Nishimura (2006) [4] showed how an individual organism should optimize the time it takes to respond to an environmental change ("waiting time''). If the optimal waiting time is considered to act over the population, there are implications for the expected value of the mean fitness in that population. A stochastic predator-prey model is proposed in which the prey have a fixed initial energy budget. Fitness is the product of survival probability and the energy remaining for non-defensive purposes. The model is placed in the stochastic domain by assuming that the waiting time in the population is a normally distributed random variable because of biological variance inherent in mounting the response. It is found that the value of the mean waiting time that maximises fitness depends linearly on the variance of the waiting time
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