Demanda intradiaria de un servicio de urgencias hospitalario. Análisis del comportamiento estacional

Resumen

In the field of health care management, having detailed information on the available resources and the behaviour of the actors involved is indispensable to ensuring that decision-making leads to the desired results. Generally speaking, short-term variations in certain medical magnitudes are important to management decisionmaking and the relevance of seasonal variations in organising health care services is indisputable. For this reason, the analysis of the seasonal patterns often observed in historical health care series is an attractive task. In the specific case of emergency health care services, the final result of the care delivered may depend largely on the speed with which the patient receives attention and, despite the fact that many situations are unpredictable, a precise understanding of the yearly, weekly or daily variations in demand is extremely useful for ensuring good quality service. The present study proposes to use procedures based on so-called spline functions built into a structural model to study the seasonal component of the number of patients catered for, shift-by-shift, in the Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria University Hospital emergency ward. These methodological tools were used to detect inter-shift differences in the number of visits recorded in the series analysed and to describe weekly and daily demand patterns.