# The Importance Of Waiting Time To Service

Decent Essays
Waiting times to each service for these data sets are shown in Figure~\ref{WaitCAOnly} and Figure~\ref{WaitCACombo}, respectively. They seem longer for patients with larger values of assessment urgency scale; in particular, levels 5 \& 6. Level 4, in most cases has the shortest waiting times to services. Patients with an assigned value of "5" seem to have the longest waiting times. There seems to be two separate distributions for waiting times to some departments; in which levels 5 \& 6 are not given services as quickly as the rest. When a clinician was contacted for expert advice, he speculated that AUS level 6 could be a group of patients who were excluded from further clinical intervention. I.e. the group of patients whom clinicians…show more content…
It would be expected that higher levels of AUS; being more urgent, would have the least waiting times to services.\newline Table~\ref{AUSDorA} also shows that there were more patients who died in levels 5 \& 6 than in the other levels. In fact, level 5 recorded the most number of deaths proportionately. This is also counter expectation as one would expect AUS level 6 to have had the most deaths. \begin{table}[H] \centering \caption{Number of patients who died in each Assessment urgency level group.} \label{AUSDorA} \begin{tabular}{|l|l|l|l|l|l|l|l|} \hline Assessment Urgency Scale & 0 & 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & 5 & 6 \\ \hline Alive & 4 & 141 & 28 & 360 & 171 & 100 & 109 \\ \hline Dead & 3 & 12 & 6 & 74 & 48 & 158 & 87 \\ \hline \end{tabular} \end{table} From Figure~\ref{CAOnly} and Figure~\ref{CACombo}, it is not clear whether the patients with AUS levels 5 \& 6 who have long waiting times for the Community service, say, would probably have had shorter waiting times for the Emergency service. Therefore, pursuing such an investigation seemed prudent. Waiting times were calculated by taking the shortest time to any of Emergency, Community, Inpatient or outpatient. If the