Lay summary
The emergency department (ED) is the gateway through which a large proportion of patients are admitted to hospital beds. Services within the hospital need to adjust quickly to demand for beds from ED. Currently, they only know a bed is needed when a request is actually made by a physician from within ED. This project will provide a “heads-up” of two or more hours of the number of beds likely needed by each service by drawing on the extensive data sources of the CDHB to predict early in a patient’s presentation to the ED their possible bed need. Real-time data from the beginning of a patient’s journey, either by a call for an ambulance or to Healthline or attendance at a General Practice, will be used to further improve the accuracy of the predictions for bed use and for other resource use within the ED.