Measuring NHS activity

Measuring and modelling occupancy time in NHS continuing healthcare

BACKGROUND Due to increasing demand and financial constraints, NHS continuing healthcare systems seek to find better ways of forecasting demand and budgeting for care. This paper investigates two areas of concern, namely, how long existing patients stay in service and the number of patients that are likely to be still in care after a period of time. METHODS An anonymised dataset containing in...

David Oliver: Unproductive activity and NHS consultants.

With constrained public money, a growing focus arises on doctors’ key role in reducing variation in processes and outcomes and improving value in healthcare, especially how money is spent and what it delivers in outcomes that matter to patients and system efficiencies. Earlier this year John Appleby published an analysis in The BMJ comparing current and historical productivity of NHS consultant...

Measuring Speech Activity

This report discusses the algorithm described in ITU-T Recommendation P.56 for measuring the active speech level. Method B in P.56 determines a speech activity factor representing the fraction of time that the signal is considered to be active speech (as opposed to background idle noise) and the corresponding active level for the speech part of the signal. The basic algorithm generates an envel...

Measuring antioxidant activity

Antioxidants are used in a wide variety of food products, and their activity may vary depending on the temperature, food composition, food structure and availability of oxygen. Temperatures at which antioxidant activity may be required range from 180–200°C for frying oils, to about 5 °C for products such as margarine or mayonnaise that are stored in the fridge. Besides the processing and storag...

Measuring autonomic nervous system activity