Are wait times and length of stay in Alberta emergency departments for children’s mental health meeting national benchmarks? Trends from 2002 to 2008
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To describe wait times, treatment times and length of stay (LOS) for pediatric mental health visits to emergency departments (EDs). METHODS: The present study was a retrospective cohort analysis of mental health visits (n=30,656) made by children <18 years of age between April 2002 and March 2008 to EDs in Alberta using administrative data. Wait time (time from triage to physician assessment), treatment time (time from physician assessment to end of visit) and LOS (time from start to end of visit) were examined for each visit. Wait time and treatment time data were available for 2006 to 2008, and LOS data were available for all study years. Wait times and LOS were compared with national benchmarks for the Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale (CTAS; levels 1 [resuscitative] through 5 [nonurgent]). All times are presented in h and min. RESULTS: Median wait times for visits triaged as CTAS 1, 2, 3 and 4 exceeded national recommendations. The longest wait times were for visits triaged as urgent (CTAS 3; 1 h 46 min) and less urgent (CTAS 4; 1 h 45 min). Lower-acuity visits had wait times that exceeded treatment times (CTAS 4: 1 h 45 min versus 1 h 8 min; CTAS 5: 1 h 5 min versus 52 min). Across all CTAS levels, the LOS in the ED increased during the study period, but met national benchmarks. CONCLUSIONS: Most median ED wait times for pediatric mental health visits exceeded national recommendations, while the median LOS for all visits met recommendations. Lower-acuity visits had wait times that exceeded treatment times. Future research should explore whether longer wait times are associated with adverse outcomes, and whether current wait/treatment times are warranted to ensure that ED throughput is optimized.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".