Monday, March 14, 2005

Update on A&E Targets

Argh. Natasha Kaplinsky just said on BBC Breakfast that 40% of A&E Patients have been discharged early. Not even the BMA are saying that, the BMA say that in 40% of A&E departments someone has been discharged early.

If each of the 200 A&E Departments treated 50,000 patients per year (YDH is one of the smaller ones at 36,000 attendances, Victoria Hospital Blackpool was said this morning to be one of the biggest at 80,000 attendances) then that means the NHS in England has treated 10 million patients. So Natasha's just claimed that 4 million patients have been discharged early.

If we assume that early discharges are randomly spread throughout the NHS, if all A&E departments are exactly the same size and 60% of departments didn't have one then mathematics can give us the answer for how many early discharges there were. That's 102 early discharges, 102 early discharges in 10 million = 99.99898% chance of an individual patient not being discharged early. Chance of a department seeing 50,000 patients without having an early discharge, 99.99898% ^ 50,000 = 60.05%

Granted the early discharges are unlikely to be random, I can imagine a department hovering at 97.9% a couple of days before the end of the quarter and the word coming down that the department have to have no breaches in the last couple of days or else, then maybe 2 or 3 people might be discharged early. So a gut feeling would to double the calculated figure to something like 200 patients.

That's an awful lot less than 4 million.

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