LCHE seminar - Igor Francetic (University of Manchester)

In various health care settings, care professionals prioritise patients that wait in queues to be treated. Prioritising one patient can increase delays for others and potentially impact both equity and efficiency. We calculate a measure of queue prioritisation for all 11M Emergency Department (ED) attendances in England in 2017/18 and examine inequalities in the prioritisation of patients in ED queues. We reduce the risk of unobservable confounding by examining how patient re-ordering responds to unexpected demand surges. To obtain plausibly exogenous daily demand shocks we partial out hospital-specific month-day-of-the-week seasonality. We find that ethnic minorities, residents of deprived neighbourhoods and females are marginally but systematically deprioritized during busier-than-expected days. The small inequalities by deprivation and ethnicity are likely to reflect language barriers.