Analyzing supply and demand on a general internal medicine ward: a cross-sectional study

(A) Distribution of 8 am census in general internal medicine inpatient service, by month (data from January 2016 to December 2018). (B) Median census by hour of day and day of week. Data ranged from January 2016 to February 2019, Sunday to Saturday, excluding holidays. (C) Distribution of daily frequency of internal medicine consults. Data spans from January 2016 to December 2018. (D) Frequency of emergency department consults by hour of request (actual or imputed). Data ranged from January 2016 to December 2018. Note: For the census and emergency department consults data, box-whisker plot is used to show an indication of how the census (or consult frequency) volumes are spread out. The lower and upper bounds of the box represent, respectively, the 25th percentile and the 75th percentile of the volume of census (or consult frequency), and the horizontal line inside the box represents the median of the data. The range that the box covers (25th percentile to 75th percentile) is defined as interquartile range (IQR), and the lower and upper ends of the whiskers represent the “minimum” (i.e., 25th percentile – 1.5*IQR) and “maximum” (i.e., 75th percentile + 1.5*IQR) observation in the sample, respectively. The black dots are outliers.