Post 6: Increase in volume on holidays
In honor of the upcoming holiday season, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, NYE, etc. I chose to focus on the effects that holidays have on hospitals. Not sure if you've ever watch Grey's Anatomy, but it's a classic plot line to have a huge emergency on a holiday.
So I guess my question to explore here is, is there a noticeable change in volume during holiday seasons? Is this something the medical team thinks about to staff differently?
A study done in the Turkish Journal of Emergency Medicine did a study observing two different nine day periods. One nine day period was a "non-holiday" period, the other was during a festival season. The outcomes observed show an increase in volume, "Of the 6353 emergency department visits included in the study, 3523 (55.5%) were during the holiday period and 2830 (45.5%) were during the non-holiday period, which indicated a 10% increase in the volume of emergency department visits during the holiday period."(DAGAR, S. 2014). In a similar study done in 2006, we see a 9 percent increase in the volume of patients during the Christmas and New Years Eve season. (Zheng, W. 2007). So it is apparent that emergency departments are seemingly more busy during the holiday season- which I feel like we did not need to look at studies to know.
The question of "if" is answered, so I'l leave my readers with my other question. What have hospitals done to decrease the volume or combat the increased volume? Is this something management has to account for and does staff increase?
Hope everyone has a good and scary Halloween!!
Grace
DAGAR, S., SAHIN, S., YILMAZ, Y., & DURAK, U. (2014). Emergency Department During Long Public
Holidays. Turkish Journal of Emergency Medicine, 14(4), 165–171.
So I guess my question to explore here is, is there a noticeable change in volume during holiday seasons? Is this something the medical team thinks about to staff differently?
A study done in the Turkish Journal of Emergency Medicine did a study observing two different nine day periods. One nine day period was a "non-holiday" period, the other was during a festival season. The outcomes observed show an increase in volume, "Of the 6353 emergency department visits included in the study, 3523 (55.5%) were during the holiday period and 2830 (45.5%) were during the non-holiday period, which indicated a 10% increase in the volume of emergency department visits during the holiday period."(DAGAR, S. 2014). In a similar study done in 2006, we see a 9 percent increase in the volume of patients during the Christmas and New Years Eve season. (Zheng, W. 2007). So it is apparent that emergency departments are seemingly more busy during the holiday season- which I feel like we did not need to look at studies to know.
The question of "if" is answered, so I'l leave my readers with my other question. What have hospitals done to decrease the volume or combat the increased volume? Is this something management has to account for and does staff increase?
Hope everyone has a good and scary Halloween!!
Grace
Zheng, W., Muscatello, D. J., & Chan, A. C. (2007). Deck the halls with rows of trolleys . . . emergency departments are busiest over the Christmas holiday period. The Medical Journal of Australia, 187(11), 630–633.
DAGAR, S., SAHIN, S., YILMAZ, Y., & DURAK, U. (2014). Emergency Department During Long Public
Holidays. Turkish Journal of Emergency Medicine, 14(4), 165–171.
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