BACKGROUND Reducing wait times is a key goal of Canadian health planners and policy makers. Using data from the EMRs of 23 family physicians across southwestern Ontario, we present data on wait times to see a specialist, and evaluate these data for equity. METHODS Cross-sectional analysis of EMR database of 29,303 patients and 544,398 encounters from October 2005 to July 2010. Wait time was c...

There are two main approaches, conservative and optimistic, for maintaining consistency in distributed network games. Under the conservative approach, players may experience network latency, depending on packet transfer delay caused by the send-and-wait and acknowledging processes. Under the optimistic approach, the processes do not wait for other players’ packets and advance to their own frame...

A graph G is called interval colorable if it has a proper edge coloring with colors 1,2,3,… such that the of edges incident to every vertex form an integers. Not all graphs are colorable; in fact, quite few families have been proved admit colorings. In this paper we introduce and investigate new notion, thickness G, denoted θint(G), which minimum number edge-disjoint subgraphs whose union G. Ou...

INTRODUCTION Our goal was to evaluate patients' threshold for waiting in an emergency department (ED) waiting room before leaving without being seen (LWBS). We analyzed whether willingness to wait was influenced by perceived illness severity, age, race, triage acuity level, or insurance status. METHODS We conducted this survey-based study from March to July 2010 at an urban academic medical c...

We show that no algorithm exists for deciding whether a nite task for three or more processors is wait-free solvable in the asyn-chronous read-write shared-memory model. This impossibility result implies that there is no constructive (recursive) characterization of wait-free solvable tasks. It also applies to other shared-memory models of distributed computing, such as the comparison-based model.

OBJECTIVE To examine factors that affect wait times for women seeking breast reconstruction at a Canadian academic centre. METHODS A retrospective audit of 57 women seeking breast reconstruction over a three-year period was completed. Comparisons of wait times were made considering the surgical pathology, timing of reconstruction (immediate versus delayed), urgency of pathology, method of rec...