Detecting Regional Differences in Italian Health Services during Five COVID-19 Waves

Lucio Palazzo () and Riccardo Ievoli ()
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Lucio Palazzo: Department of Political Sciences, University of Naples Federico II, 80143 Naples, Italy
Riccardo Ievoli: Department of Chemical, Pharmaceutical and Agricultural Sciences, University of Ferrara, 44121 Ferrara, Italy

Stats, 2023, vol. 6, issue 2, 1-13

Abstract: During the waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, both national and/or territorial healthcare systems have been severely stressed in many countries. The availability (and complexity) of data requires proper comparisons for understanding differences in the performance of health services. With this aim, we propose a methodological approach to compare the performance of the Italian healthcare system at the territorial level, i.e., considering NUTS 2 regions. Our approach consists of three steps: the choice of a distance measure between available time series, the application of weighted multidimensional scaling (wMDS) based on this distance, and, finally, a cluster analysis on the MDS coordinates. We separately consider daily time series regarding the deceased, intensive care units, and ordinary hospitalizations of patients affected by COVID-19. The proposed procedure identifies four clusters apart from two outlier regions. Changes between the waves at a regional level emerge from the main results, allowing the pressure on territorial health services to be mapped between 2020 and 2022.

Keywords: regional healthcare; time series; multidimensional scaling; cluster analysis; trimmed k-means (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C1 C10 C11 C14 C15 C16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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