Hospital waiting lists.

Wide variations in hospital waiting times and lists.

Influencing Waiting Lists

In many settings, randomly arriving objects are offered successively to agents according to their fixed order in a waiting list. Though it is costly to wait, an agent may prefer to decline an offered object in order to wait for a better one (e.g. as in perhaps the most significant of such environments, the assignment of donor organs to queued patients). We consider the welfare consequences of i...

Waiting lists for surgery.

© 2002 Canadian Medical Association S waiting lists are seen by many as epitomizing the shortcomings of our public health care system. Yet, they can also be interpreted as being the result of a societal compromise between the founders’ promise of universal access to care and the reality of currently committed resources. Regardless of one’s perception, the debate about the “appropriate length” o...

Waiting lists, waiting times and admissions: an empirical analysis at hospital and general practice level.

We report an empirical analysis of the responses of the supply and demand for secondary care to waiting list size and waiting times. Whereas previous empirical analyses have used data aggregated to area level, our analysis focuses on the supply responses of a single hospital and the demand responses of the GP practices it serves, and distinguishes between first outpatient visits, inpatient admi...

Admissions from surgical waiting lists.

Many factors tend to reduce the efficiency of bed utilization in general hospitals. A numerically small, but clinically well-recognized, cause of wastage arises from the failure of waiting list patients to attend for admission when offered beds. The relative severity of the problem varies between clinical specialties, according to the proportions of total admissions accounted for by waiting lis...