Search PubMed⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search PubMed

Results for “Service Statistics”

Search indexed PubMed citations on genomics, clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health. Explore titles, authors and supplied subject terms, then open the PubMed record.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 1,153 records · Page 64Linked to original sources
PubMedDate not supplied

[Probabilistic models to analyze psychiatric contacts].

OBJECTIVE: To present three probabilistic models (Poisson, negative binomial, Waring) to analyze the distribution of the number of contacts of patients followed using a psychiatric case register. DESIGN: Longitudinal to obtain the distribution of the number of contacts (during 91 days following that of the first contact) observed on patients followed using the South-Verona Psychiatric Case Register during the period 1/1/79-31/12/91. RESULTS: There were a total number of 6913 contacts on 3454 subjects. The chi-square test for the goodness of fit yields a significant result both for the Poisson distribution (3580 with 6 degrees of freedom, p < 0.001) and for the negative binomial distribution (65.47 with 18 degrees of freedom, p < 0.001); on the other hand a non significant result was obtained for the Waring distribution (25.31 with 19 degrees of freedom, p = 0.151). CONCLUSIONS: The Poisson distribution gave a very poor fit for the distribution of contacts. The negative binomial distribution could be employed to analyze the pattern of contacts when the right tail of the distribution is not important. The Waring distribution is the best of the three presented. Moreover, the variance of the Waring distribution can be decomposed in three components: a random component, a component which accounts for endogenous factors and another component which accounts for esogenous factors. Therefore the Waring distribution is useful when one wants to make comparisons between psychiatric case registers of the same country or of different countries.

Humans↗
PubMed2004

Public mis-notification of coastal water quality: a probabilistic evaluation of posting errors at Huntington Beach, California.

Whenever measurements of fecal pollution in coastal bathing waters reach levels that might pose a significant health risk, warning signs are posted on public beaches in California. Analysis of historical shoreline monitoring data from Huntington Beach, southern California, reveals that protocols used to decide whether to post a sign are prone to error. Errors in public notification (referred to here as posting errors) originate from the variable character of pollutant concentrations in the ocean, the relatively infrequent sampling schedule adopted by most monitoring programs (daily to weekly), and the intrinsic error associated with binary advisories in which the public is either warned or not. In this paper, we derive a probabilistic framework for estimating posting error rates, which at Huntington Beach range from 0 to 41%, and show that relatively high sample-to-sample correlations (>0.4) are required to significantly reduce binary advisory posting errors. Public mis-notification of coastal water quality can be reduced by utilizing probabilistic approaches for predicting current coastal water quality, and adopting analog, instead of binary, warning systems.

Algorithms↗
PubMed2003

Job satisfaction of psychiatric hospital employees: a new measure of an old concern.

The authors report on the factor structure of an employee satisfaction questionnaire designed for use with psychiatric hospital employees. The actions and attitudes of management were, by far, the single most prominent factor. This factor captures the extent to which management respects workers, operates with honesty and integrity, promotes efficiency, and has open lines of communication with employees. By surveying employees about the 15 items of this factor, psychiatric hospital managers can obtain a sense of their employees' overall satisfaction. Hospitals must hire and train managers who can convey the qualities represented in this satisfaction factor. It is also important for hospital managers to recognize that employee satisfaction is strongly related to how employee complaints are handled, how employees perceive the quality of patient care, and the extent to which employees believe the hospital serves the greater community.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗
PubMed2002

Classification and incidence of cancers in adolescents and young adults in England 1979-1997.

Cancer patients aged 15-24 years have distinct special needs. High quality cancer statistics are required for service planning. Data presented by primary site are inappropriate for this age group. We have developed a morphology-based classification and applied it to national cancer registration data for England 1979-1997. The study included 25,000 cancers and 134 million person-years at risk. Rates for each diagnostic group by age, sex and time period (1979-83, 1984-87, 1988-92, 1993-1997) were calculated. Overall rates in 15-19 and 20-24-year-olds were 144 and 226 per million person-years respectively. Lymphomas showed the highest rates in both age groups. Rates for leukaemias and bone tumours were lower in 20-24 year olds. Higher rates for carcinomas, central nervous system tumours, germ-cell tumours, soft tissue sarcomas and melanoma were seen in the older group. Poisson regression showed incidence increased over the study period by an average of 1.5% per annum (P<0.0001). Significant increases were seen in non-Hodgkins lymphoma (2.3%), astrocytoma (2.3%), germ-cell tumours (2.3%), melanoma (5.1%) and carcinoma of the thyroid (3.5%) and ovary (3.0%). Cancers common in the elderly are uncommon in adolescents and young adults. The incidence of certain cancers in the latter is increasing. Future studies should be directed towards aetiology.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1999

High early mortality rate from acute pancreatitis in Scotland, 1984-1995.

BACKGROUND: Death from acute pancreatitis within the first week after admission is usually a consequence of multiple organ dysfunction. Reports from specialist centres suggest that, with improvements in resuscitation and supportive care, such deaths are becoming uncommon but it is unclear if this is reflected in a decrease in early mortality rate from acute pancreatitis in the general population. METHODS: Data concerning patients discharged with a diagnosis of acute pancreatitis (International Classification of Disease-9 code 577.0) between 1984 and 1995 were obtained from the Information and Statistics Division, National Health Service in Scotland, and analysed on a computer database. RESULTS: The incidence of acute pancreatitis in Scotland continues to increase in both sexes. The in-hospital mortality rate (death from all causes) was 7.5 per cent and showed a slight but significant downward trend over the period of study. Death within 7 days of hospital admission accounted for 53.7 per cent of all deaths and the proportion of early deaths did not decline over the study interval. CONCLUSION: These results suggest that scope remains for considerable improvement in the early management of acute pancreatitis. There is an urgent need to improve the early recognition of severe pancreatitis coupled to a willingness on behalf of clinicians to transfer these patients at an early stage to a centre with high-dependency and intensive care facilities supervised by a multidisciplinary team with expertise in the endoscopic, radiological and surgical management of these patients.

Acute Disease↗
PubMed2002

Evidence for reversal of the caries decline among Norwegian children.

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of the present study was to report on caries status and to explore possible reasons for changes in caries experience among 5- and 12-year-old Norwegian children. DESIGN: National cross-sectional and time trend study. METHODS: Aggregated data from the Public Dental Services and from official statistics were used. Information was available on the total number of children, the proportion receiving treatment, sale of fluoride tablets, socio-economic background, caries prevalence and dmft/DMFT scores. RESULTS: The prevalence of caries among 5-year-olds reached a low of 30.4% in 1997 and increased to 38.9% in 2000. The mean dmft scores increased from 1.1 to 1.5. Conversely, the prevalence of caries among 12-year-olds decreased from 55.4% in 1997 to 52.2% in 2000 and the mean DMFT score from 1.7 to 1.5. Bivariate analyses at county level revealed significant associations, which for the most part disappeared in multivariate analyses. The sale of fluoride tablets had a significant effect on caries prevalence among 5-year-olds in 1998, in 1999 and in 2000. Infant mortality was associated with the dmft score in 1999. The only consistently significant predictor of caries experience at 12 years of age was caries prevalence at age 5. CONCLUSIONS: There has been a highly significant increase in caries experience among 5-year-olds (P < 0.001) and a levelling off among 12-year-olds over the past 3 years. Considering the association between caries prevalence at age 5 and caries experience at 12 years of age, there is a need for reassessment of the caries preventive programmes for children in Norway.

Age Factors↗
PubMed2001

Informal caregivers' participation in elderly-patient care: an interrupted time-series study.

This study is an evaluation of a project in Finland that aimed to promote the participation of informal caregivers in the hospital care of elderly patients. The staff who worked in the wards that were studied built up activation programmes for informal caregivers, and changed ward policies to encourage caregivers' participation. To explore changes in caregivers' participation in the study and the control wards, non-equivalent control groups were used. During periods of two months in 1991, 1992 and 1993, the data were collected from informal caregivers (N = 369) using a structured questionnaire. The results indicated that total participation of informal caregivers in daily activities increased in long-term care settings, but not in the university hospital. However, a small increase in informal caregivers' participation in some daily activities of elderly patients took place in the study wards of each setting. The findings and implications for nursing are discussed.

Activities of Daily Living↗
PubMed2002

Lack of correlation between facility-based standardized rates of transplantation and mortality.

The standardized mortality ratio (SMR) has been used to provide information about adjusted survival outcomes at dialysis facilities. There has been concern that high rates of transplantation could unjustly lead to unfavorable SMR profiles for individual dialysis units because healthier patients would be removed from dialysis therapy, leaving less healthy patients in the dialysis pool. We correlated 1999 overall adjusted SMR and 1999 standardized transplantation ratio (STR) weighted for mortality patient count and count of first transplantations of patients younger than 65 years. A total of 2,362 facilities were included in analyses. We found no correlation between rates of transplantation (by STR) and overall mortality profile (by SMR) based on Pearson's correlation coefficients (r), either unweighted, weighted by number of patients included in the 1999 mortality calculation (SMR), or weighted by number of patients included in the 1999 transplantation calculation (r = -0.016, r = -0.015, and r = -0.015, respectively; P > 0.40 for each). Sensitivity analyses using SMR and STR over 3- and 3.5-year periods (January 1997 to June 2000) also showed no correlation between SMR and STR, respectively. We conclude that reported standardized rates for transplantation do not correlate with those reported for mortality by dialysis facilities.

Age Factors↗
PubMed2003

Waiting times in California's emergency departments.

STUDY OBJECTIVE: Many perceive emergency department crowding as a significant problem that is getting worse. A national survey of ED directors defined crowding, in part, as waiting more than 1 hour to see a physician, a wait considered likely to result in adverse outcomes. Yet few data are available on ED waiting times among a heterogeneous group of hospitals serving a distinct geographic region. METHODS: We observed a random sample of 1,798 patients visiting 30 California EDs between December 15, 2000, and May 15, 2001. We defined waiting time as the interval from ED arrival to first contact with a physician or midlevel provider. RESULTS: Patients waited an average of 56 minutes (95% confidence interval [CI] 52 to 61 minutes; median 38 minutes); 42% waited longer than 60 minutes. Ordinary least squares regression analysis revealed that waiting times were significantly longer at hospitals in poorer neighborhoods: For every 10,000 dollars decline in per capita income, patients waited 10.1 minutes longer (95% CI 1.8 to 18.4 minutes; P=.02) after adjusting for hospital ownership, teaching status, trauma status, proximity to a recently closed ED, ED volume, patient severity, and age. Lower ratios of physicians and triage nurses to waiting room patient were also associated with longer waits. CONCLUSION: Waiting times often exceeded the threshold set by a survey of ED directors. Further study is required to examine factors that lead to longer waiting times at hospitals in low-income areas. Physician and nurse staffing should be investigated as a means of reducing waiting times.

Age Factors↗
PubMed2001

Factors influencing patients' length of stay.

This study was conducted to evaluate the ability of AN-DRG version 3.1 to predict variation in patients' length of stay in hospital (LOS) and identify other factors that can influence the LOS by using routinely collected hospital morbidity data. A total of 18 DRGs that comprised 4,589 episodes were analysed. Multiple regression was used to model length of stay as a function of a number of independent variables. Overall only 37.6% of variation in mean length of stay could be explained. DRGs predicted 30% of the total variation. Other factors such as age, payment classification, source of referral, specialty of doctor, and ethnic group also influenced patient length of stay. It was concluded that the limited explanation was a consequence of a lack of a better indicator of severity within DRGs.

Diagnosis-Related Groups↗
PubMed2004

The architecture of complex weighted networks.

Networked structures arise in a wide array of different contexts such as technological and transportation infrastructures, social phenomena, and biological systems. These highly interconnected systems have recently been the focus of a great deal of attention that has uncovered and characterized their topological complexity. Along with a complex topological structure, real networks display a large heterogeneity in the capacity and intensity of the connections. These features, however, have mainly not been considered in past studies where links are usually represented as binary states, i.e., either present or absent. Here, we study the scientific collaboration network and the world-wide air-transportation network, which are representative examples of social and large infrastructure systems, respectively. In both cases it is possible to assign to each edge of the graph a weight proportional to the intensity or capacity of the connections among the various elements of the network. We define appropriate metrics combining weighted and topological observables that enable us to characterize the complex statistical properties and heterogeneity of the actual strength of edges and vertices. This information allows us to investigate the correlations among weighted quantities and the underlying topological structure of the network. These results provide a better description of the hierarchies and organizational principles at the basis of the architecture of weighted networks.

Data Interpretation, Statistical↗
PubMed2006

A likelihood approach to analysis of network data.

Biological, sociological, and technological network data are often analyzed by using simple summary statistics, such as the observed degree distribution, and nonparametric bootstrap procedures to provide an adequate null distribution for testing hypotheses about the network. In this article we present a full-likelihood approach that allows us to estimate parameters for general models of network growth that can be expressed in terms of recursion relations. To handle larger networks we have developed an importance sampling scheme that allows us to approximate the likelihood and draw inference about the network and how it has been generated, estimate the parameters in the model, and perform parametric bootstrap analysis of network data. We illustrate the power of this approach by estimating growth parameters for the Caenorhabditis elegans protein interaction network.

Animals↗
PubMed2005

Analysis of the ups and downs of caries experience among Norwegian children aged five years between 1997 and 2003.

OBJECTIVE: To study caries trends and investigate the possible reasons for changes among 5-year-old Norwegian children in the period 1997-2003. In this cross-sectional analytical time trend study at district, county, and national levels, aggregated data from the Public Dental Services (PDS) and official statistics were used, i.e. number of children and percentage receiving treatment, sale of fluoride tablets, socio-economic background, caries prevalence, and d3mft scores. RESULTS: Caries prevalence increased from 30% in 1997 to just over 40% in 2001, but by 2003 it had dropped to 36%. The corresponding mean number of d3mft were 1.1, 1.6, and 1.4 at national level. Caries prevalence and experience varied considerably between counties and between dental districts throughout the observation period. Multivariate analyses at county level indicated a significant negative association (p < 0.05) between caries prevalence, the sale of fluoride tablets, and net mobility. The impacts of the predictor variables education, income, infant mortality, proportion of immigrants, and the percentage of children treated varied but were rarely significant. CONCLUSIONS: The increasing trend in the prevalence of caries among 5-year-old Norwegian children in the period 1997 to 2001 has reversed. The deterioration in dental health of 5-year-olds after 1997 was associated with a reduction in the sale of fluoride tablets, whereas increased sales of fluoride tablets after 1998 reflect improved caries prevention among preschool children and may explain the improved caries status of these children in 2003.

Administration, Oral↗