RESUMEN
Risk assessments are common in multiple domains, from finance to medicine. They require evaluating an event's potential severity and likelihood. We investigate the possible dependence of likelihood and severity within the domain of impact-based weather forecasting (IBF), following predictions derived from considering asymmetric loss functions. In a collaboration between UK psychologists and partners from four meteorological organisations in Southeast Asia, we conducted two studies (N = 363) eliciting weather warnings from forecasters. Forecasters provided warnings denoting higher likelihoods for high severity impacts than low severity impacts, despite these impacts being described as having the same explicit numerical likelihood of occurrence. This 'Severity effect' is pervasive, and we find it can have a continued influence even for an updated forecast. It is additionally observed when translating warnings made on a risk matrix to numerical probabilities.
RESUMEN
Day of admission neurosurgery is a viable method to reduce health care associated costs, complications and length of stay. Within the national health service in England the picture is very mixed with some neurosurgery centres universally admitting patients the day before and others admitting on the day of surgery.We altered our admissions policy during a 4 month time period from 'day-before' surgery to 'day-of' surgery for elective neurosurgery. A number of patients still continued to be admitted the day before surgery due to consultant choice. We conducted a comparative cohort study of these two patient groups to see if there were any differences in surgical cancellation rates, the reasons for these cancellations and the implied cost savings.In total 199 patients underwent neurosurgery during this time period, 87 patients were admitted on the 'day-of' and 112 patients on the 'day-before' surgery. The overall cancellation rate was 18%. The cancellation rate in patients admitted on the 'day-of' surgery was 12.6% (11/87). The rate of cancellation in patients admitted the 'day-before' surgery was 22.3% (25/112). This difference was not significant (p = 0.1). Day of surgery admission resulted in a cost saving of almost £30,000 in this group of patients over a 4 month period. If extrapolated for all patients over the course of a year it would result in cost savings in the region of £150,000.In summary, admitting elective neurosurgery patients on the day of surgery does not affect cancellation rates, prevents unnecessary overnight hospital admission and results in significant cost saving.