LCHE seminar - Disorderly queues: How does unexpected demand affect queue prioritisation in emergency care?

The Lausanne Center for Health Economics, Behavior, and Policy (LCHE) regularly organizes seminars about Health Economics. More details on www.lche.ch.

Topic of the day

Disorderly queues: How does unexpected demand affect queue prioritisation in emergency care?

In various health care settings, care professionals prioritise patients that wait in queues to be treated. Prioritising one patient can increase delays for others and potentially impact both equity and efficiency. 

We calculate a measure of queue prioritisation for all 11M Emergency Department (ED) attendances in England in 2017/18 and examine inequalities in the prioritisation of patients in ED queues. We reduce the risk of unobservable confounding by examining how patient re-ordering responds to unexpected demand surges. To obtain plausibly exogenous daily demand shocks we partial out hospital-specific month-day-of-the-week seasonality. 

We find that ethnic minorities, residents of deprived neighbourhoods and females are marginally but systematically deprioritized during busier-than-expected days. The small inequalities by deprivation and ethnicity are likely to reflect language barriers.

Speaker

• Dr Igor Francetic

Igor is an applied economist focusing on health and healthcare. His research interest include the impact of changes in primary care workforce, the population-wide effects of mental healthcare supply on labour market outcomes, and the measurement of inequalities in emergency care and cancer detection and diagnosis. Igor is Ambizione Research Fellow at SUPSI and is also affiliated with the University of Manchester (UK).

Practical information

• Free admission
• No need to register
• This seminar is given in English

About LCHE

The Lausanne Center for Health Economics, Behavior, and Policy (LCHE) at the University of Lausanne (UNIL) promotes research, teaching, and policy advice in the fields of health economics, behavior, and policy.

The interdisciplinary center brings together researchers of the Center for Primary Care and Public Health (Unisanté), the Faculty of Biology and Medicine (CHUV-FBM), and the Faculty of Business and Economics (HEC).