1993. Quantifying the association between the doctor patient ratio and patient life expectancy in England
Invited abstract in session TD-13: Machine learning in healthcare, stream OR in Healthcare (ORAHS).
Tuesday, 14:30-16:00Room: Clarendon SR 1.01
Authors (first author is the speaker)
| 1. | Colin Stewart
|
| More Metrics Ltd |
Abstract
Data collated by the World Health Organization shows that countries with longer life expectancies have higher doctor to patient ratios on average. It seems reasonable to suppose that this relationship between resourcing and life expectancy should also hold true within countries.
To test this, More Metrics have analysed publicly available data for 6000 general practice surgeries in England. The objective of this study is to quantify the incremental impact on life expectancy of the primary care doctor patient ratio taking full account of confounding factors (such as community deprivation levels).
Our study uses disaggregation to show the same directional relationship between life expectancy and resourcing in England as seen in the international data. In the talk we will first illustrate the disaggregation method applied to smoker status exposures before applying the same method to quantify the impact of different doctor patient ratio exposures on life expectancy.
The results show that while the doctor patient ratio is important, other factors relating to the work of primary care professionals also affect patient life expectancy. An extension of our study that combines resourcing levels with GP diagnosis patterns illustrates the benefits of taking a more rounded view. This extended study has led to the development of a GP performance grid aimed at supporting local resourcing decisions. This will be briefly described together with our plans for further work.
Keywords
- Health Care
- Machine Learning
- Decision Analysis
Status: accepted
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