Research paper on the trends of waiting times in NHS UK hospitals.
Title: Trends in Accident & Emergency Waiting Times from NHS UK
Authors: Jakub Malý and Julia Miklas
Date: May 2022
NHS Scotland’s accident and emergency departments (A&Es) have a 4-hour wait standard (more than 95% of patients should be admitted, discharged, or transferred within 4 hours from arrival). We look at the NHS statistics for A&E patients between 2007 and 2021 and visualise trends within the data. We concentrate on how the NHS board, population size, and seasonality affect the compliance to the standard.
Our findings show that the percentage of patients seen within 4 hours (henceforth referred to as the compliance percentage) has been on a long-term decreasing trend (0,205% per year), with emergency departments having the steepest decline (0,574% per year). Furthermore we identified that some of the possible factors causing this drop in compliance are winter pressures, hospital infrastructure not scaled to population needs and increase in unnecessary or misdirected attendances
final_paper.pdf: PDF version of our paper.notebook.ipynb,geodata.ipynb,population.ipynb: Jupyter notebooks that include all our data manipulation, graphs, and notes.data: All data sets we used.figures: All figures from the paper.