Project description:Polarimetric weather radars offer a wealth of new information compared to conventional technology, not only to enhance quantitative precipitation estimation, warnings, and short-term forecasts, but also to improve our understanding of precipitation generating processes and their representation in numerical weather prediction models. To support such research opportunities, this paper describes an open-access dataset between 2014-2019 collected by the polarimetric Doppler X-band weather radar in Bonn (BoXPol), western Germany. To complement this dataset, the technical radar characteristics, scanning strategy and the best-practice for radar data processing are detailed. In addition, an investigation of radar calibration is presented. Reflectivity measurements from the Dual-frequency Precipitation Radar operating on the core satellite of the Global Precipitation Mission are compared to those of BoXPol to provide absolute calibration offsets with the dataset. The Relative Calibration Adjustment technique is applied to identify stable calibration periods. The absolute calibration of differential reflectivity is determined using the vertical scan and provided with the BoxPol dataset.
Project description:BackgroundTo date, there are no valid statistics regarding the number of full time staff necessary for nursing care in emergency departments in Europe.Material and methodsStaff requirement calculations were performed using state-of-the art procedures which take both fluctuating patient volume and individual staff shortfall rates into consideration. In a longitudinal observational study, the average nursing staff engagement time per patient was assessed for 503 patients. For this purpose, a full-time staffing calculation was estimated based on the five priority levels of the Manchester Triage System (MTS), taking into account specific workload fluctuations (50th-95th percentiles).ResultsPatients classified to the MTS category red (n = 35) required the most engagement time with an average of 97.93 min per patient. On weighted average, for orange MTS category patients (n = 118), nursing staff were required for 85.07 min, for patients in the yellow MTS category (n = 181), 40.95 min, while the two MTS categories with the least acute patients, green (n = 129) and blue (n = 40) required 23.18 min and 14.99 min engagement time per patient, respectively. Individual staff shortfall due to sick days and vacation time was 20.87% of the total working hours. When extrapolating this to 21,899 (2010) emergency patients, 67-123 emergency patients (50-95% percentile) per month can be seen by one nurse. The calculated full time staffing requirement depending on the percentiles was 14.8 to 27.1.ConclusionPerformance-oriented staff planning offers an objective instrument for calculation of the full-time nursing staff required in emergency departments.
