Therefore, initial selection of the recommendation was based on a detailed exploration of its characteristics, how health professionals' themselves prioritise these, degree of prioritisation of the topic in the PCT, and consideration of pragmatic factors.
This is done to reduce the number of parameters estimated and since we are concerned with the degree of prioritisation of low duration patients.
Our estimation shows that the degree of prioritisation in duration, reflecting a preference of the hospital, is an important driver of the waiting time distribution for short duration patients.
Building upon the main theoretical insights of our model, we now analyse empirically hospital-level waiting time distributions and link those to hospital characteristics estimating the parameters of our model that control the degree of capacity constraint, the degree of prioritisation and finally the cost structure.
This allows for some degree of clinical prioritisation of the list as in [7].
By exploring differences in patients' diagnoses to construct different survival curves we confirm hospitals undergo some degree of clinical prioritisation while admitting patients for treatment, selecting to treat more severe/complex cases first.
"Across all the research councils there is a degree of re-prioritisation going on and difficult decisions are taking place.
We now use our theoretical model and the empirical survival curves to estimate the main structural parameters that govern the admission patterns of healthcare providers, focusing on the degree of capacity constraint, prioritisation and cost structure to shed some little on those differences.
Both hospitals face similar degrees of capacity constraints and have similar prioritisation preference.
This question addresses the pressing problem of prioritisation head-on.
