Hospitalisation Rate For Adult Respiratory Conditions (part 5)

Lessons from an undisclosed NHS Trust

So far in this series we have been eyeballing weekly data sliced into yearly chunks so we may compare hospitalisation rates on a week-by-week basis with historical values. In the next few slides I am going to bolt the data together so we may get a feel as to what has been happening across time (time series analysis). We’re in for some surprises so I thought I’d start nice and gently with a time series of adult respiratory admissions to the emergency department (dashed grey lines represent the annual periods)…

We now see a regular burst of departmental activity aligning with the beginning of each year for 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. After 2020 things go wonky with no seasonal burst for the beginning of 2021. This is extremely odd, to say the least. What is also odd is that the biggest peak my eyeballs detect is the pre-pandemic seasonal peak for winter 2019/20. What happened to the pandemic? The ‘pandemic’ seems to squeeze into a nodule of activity during April/May of 2020 and that’s yer…