Will the winter of 2019/2020 have unusually high service demand? Part 1: Lessons
A series of articles previously published in this journal has sought to highlight the role of nearness to death upon the marginal changes in health service demand and costs (Jones, 2019a; 2019b; 2019c; 2019d; 2019e). Ambulance demand is sensitive to nearness to death (Pentaris and Mehmet, 2019). Most deaths occur during the winter and the excess winter mortality (EWM) calculation (Johnson and Griffiths, 2003) is a good way to measure which winters create the biggest capacity problems.
In this study, the excess winter mortality starts with the average deaths in the 8 months to August versus the average in the 4 months to December. Move forward 1 month and repeat the calculation.
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