Data for results provided in IPACS_visits_based_model paper

Data used for generating plots and results in IPACS paper: 

Planning integrated care services using simulation modelling for visits-based home care with time varying resource requirementsAlison Harper , David Worthington , Zehra Önen-Dumlu,  Paul Forte , Christos Vasilakis , Martin Pitt , Richard Wood

Abstract: Delays to hospital discharge impact the wider healthcare system and are a contributory factor to emergency department overcrowding, ambulance offload and response delays experienced both in the UK and globally. Health and care services comprising of care provided in community facilities and at home support timely discharge from hospital for patients with complex care needs. It attempts to avoid costly discharge delays and consequent risks to patient physical and mental health. Home care is provided by visiting care staff in patients’ homes, with time-varying visit requirements, typically reducing over time. This paper reports the development of a novel discrete-time stochastic simulation model in a large health and social care system in England, which models patients using a time-varying resource draw, rather than a fixed capacitated resource. Our results are compared to steady-state and time-dependent analytical approximations to identify areas of the parameter space in our case study where the analytical models perform sufficiently well, and to enable an empirical case for the use of time-varying resources to model visits-based home care. The flexibility of our simulation model and our purposeful engagement with stakeholders have enabled the resulting tool to be in routine use for home care resource planning. It is available open source for take-up by researchers or analysts involved in home care demand and capacity planning.