F. Dexter et Rd. Traub, The lack of systematic month-to-month variation over one-year periods in ambulatory surgery caseload - Application to anesthesia staffing, ANESTH ANAL, 91(6), 2000, pp. 1426-1430
Citations number
20
Categorie Soggetti
Aneshtesia & Intensive Care","Medical Research Diagnosis & Treatment
Anesthesia groups forecast future workload so that staffing and future hiri
ng can be adjusted. Statistical methods have been developed to estimate the
number of anesthesia providers needed to minimize labor costs during regul
arly scheduled hours, second-shifts, and weekends. These methods are simple
, in that they assume that, on this medium-range (11-mo) basis, workload va
ries irregularly around a mean workload. To test whether this assumption is
likely to hold for many anesthesia groups nationwide, raw data from the 19
94 to 1996 National Survey of Ambulatory Surgery were reanalyzed. To assure
that month-to-month systematic variation in workload (e.g., seasonal varia
tion) could be detected if it were present, the average number of myringoto
my tubes inserted each day in ambulatory surgery centers of the United Stat
es was also examined. The average number of ambulatory surgery cases perfor
med with an anesthesia provider each day in the United States per 10,000 po
pulation was found to have not varied systematically month to month on a me
dium-range (11-mo) basis. In contrast, the average number of tubes inserted
each day varied systematically among months for all 26 of the overlapping
11-mo periods in the 36 mo of the survey. These findings suggest that the r
elatively simple statistical methods that are available to estimate future
anesthesia workload will work for many anesthesia groups.