Forecasting Hospital Staff Availability During The COVID-19 Epidemic

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Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic poses two challenges to healthcare providers. Firstly, a high number of patients require hospital admission. Second, a high number of healthcare staff are either falling ill with the infection, or self-isolating. This poses significant problems for the staffing of busy hospital departments. We have created a simple model which allows users to stress test their rota. The model provides plots of staff availability over time using either a constant infection rate, or a changing infection rate fitted to population-based infection curves. It allows users to gauge the extent and timing of dips in staff availability. The basic constant infection rate model is available within an on-line web application ( https://covid19.shef.ac.uk ). As for any model, our work is imperfect. However, it allows a range of infection rates to be simulated quickly across different work patterns. We hope it will be useful to those planning staff deployment and will stimulate debate on the most effective patterns of work during the COVID-19 epidemic.

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  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.15.20066019: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.


    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code.


    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.


    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.


    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.


    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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