A Classic Analysis for Daisy
Daisy is my software for analysing databases. Some of the most successful analyses has always been to take a series of date/time based events and draw a Date and Time Daisy Chart of them. Patterns in the data are often immediately visible.
Some years ago, one of our clients, a UK county, analysed low birth weight babies, by month, day of the week and post code, to see if there were any patterns. We didn’t find anything immediately, but we did in the end find a peak of twins, nine months after Christmas and the New Year. As the type of twin, identical or fraternal was not known, we could not explain the pattern. I have since told this to an honest man, who used to run fertility clinics in the United States. He felt that there were some times of the year when it was better to have IVF. He left the fertility business, as he felt this was not the sort of service, you should give couples desperate for a child.
But to return to the reason, I have written this post. It is being reported that babies born outside of office hours are more likely to die.
I don’t think the researchers are using Daisy, but it is the classic type of analysis for which the software was designed. All you need to do, is get all the events in an Excel spreadsheet as a table and then run Daisy.
The Anonymous Widower 
I saw this article, as was horrified that anyone could consider a maternity unit to have “out of hours”. Babies dont understand 9 – 5! In my opinion, the units should be staffed the same whatever time of day.
Comment by Liz P | July 16, 2010 |
In our analysis of the births in one english county, we found that few babies were born at the weekends. Admittedly, that was data that was over twenty years old, but at the time, the doctor doing the analysis said, that you have to give the consultants the weekends off, otherwise they’ll leave and go somewhere that will!
Comment by AnonW | July 16, 2010 |