Forecasting requests for General Practitioners’ Time at a busy medical centre Version 1

Clarke, B.R., Milne, C.J., Yatawara, N. and Trepp, E.H. (2001) Forecasting requests for General Practitioners’ Time at a busy medical centre Version 1. ..

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Abstract

Objective: To create a model which relates the number of people requiring the doctors’ time in a set period to the amount of people requiring the doctor‟s time in previous periods.

Design: Observational study using the doctor’s accounts from January 1995 to December 1999.

Participant: Western Australian Medical practice, with multiple doctors and after hours consulting times.

Main Outcome Measures: Total number of people that are billed by the doctors at the medical centre for the thirteen 4-week periods each year.

Results: The number of people requiring the doctors’ time from 65 observed 4-week periods leads to a seasonal time series model. This is successfully fitted for all but one observation that is deemed to be an outlier.

Conclusions: Statistical time series models offer a useful predictor of number of peoples’ requests for future time periods, which can be helpful in managing modern general practices.