EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Do new workforce roles reduce waiting times in ED? A difference-in-difference evaluation using hospital administrative data

Anthony Scott () and Jongsay Yong

Health Policy, 2015, vol. 119, issue 4, 488-493

Abstract: This paper evaluates the effect of introducing two new workforce roles under a pilot program conducted in Victoria, Australia. The trial took place at a regional hospital's emergency department (ED) between 1 July 2008 and 30 June 2009. The evaluation is based on three outcome measures: waiting time (in minutes) at ED before treatment; proportion of presentations with waiting time on target; and length of stay (in days), for ED presentations that led to in-patient admissions. The technique of difference-in-differences analysis is used. A total of 142,980 patient records from the pilot hospital and three comparison hospitals were extracted from the Victorian Emergency Minimum Dataset (VEMD). Further, 21,925 records of patients whose ED presentations led to in-patient admissions were extracted from the Victorian Admitted Episodes Dataset (VAED). The evaluation finds the piloted roles have lowered waiting time and raised the proportion of on-target presentations. These effects were found to be the strongest for less urgent triage categories. However, the evidence on in-patient length of stay was mixed. The results provide positive evidence that new workforce roles can be effective in improving the efficiency of emergency care delivery.

Keywords: Workforce innovations; ED outcome evaluation; Difference-in-differences analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168851014003339
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:hepoli:v:119:y:2015:i:4:p:488-493

DOI: 10.1016/j.healthpol.2014.11.018

Access Statistics for this article

Health Policy is currently edited by Katrien Kesteloot, Mia Defever and Irina Cleemput

More articles in Health Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu () and ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:eee:hepoli:v:119:y:2015:i:4:p:488-493