ArticleBMC public health2017
Correcting for day of the week and public holiday effects: improving a national daily syndromic surveillance service for detecting public health threats.
Article in BMC public health, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Building the model: a review of input structures in extreme temperature-health.Environmental health : a global access science source · 2026Pooled it
- Quantifying, Understanding, and Correcting for Delays in Routine Dengue Case Reporting in the Americas.The American journal of tropical medicine and hygiene · 2026Article
- Robust estimation of the time-dependent reproduction number in the presence of weekend reporting effects.BMC global and public health · 2026Article
- Effects of relative humidity on intraocular pressure using a time-series analysis.Graefe's archive for clinical and experimental ophthalmology = Albrecht von Graefes Archiv fur klinische und experimentelle Ophthalmologie · 2026Article
- Article
- Association between daily maximum temperature and immediate-to-delayed gout flare hospitalisations: a population-level time series study in metropolitan Perth, Australia.International journal of population data science · 2026Article
- Development and Validation of a Cross-Device Platform for Anhedonia Trend Visualization by Using Ecological Momentary Assessment and Moving Averages (Part I): Protocol for a Methodological Pilot Study.JMIR research protocols · 2025Article
- Effects of Daily Ambient Temperature on Intraocular Pressure: A Time-Series Analysis Using Generalized Additive and Distributed Lag Nonlinear Models.Investigative ophthalmology & visual science · 2025Article
- Simulation-based inference of the time-dependent reproduction number from temporally aggregated and under-reported disease incidence time series data.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2025Article
- Article
- Evaluation of the application of sequence data to the identification of outbreaks of disease using anomaly detection methods.Veterinary research · 2023Article
- Cluster detection with random neighbourhood covering: Application to invasive Group A Streptococcal disease.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Article
- Developing a sentinel syndromic surveillance system using school-absenteeism data, example monitoring absences over the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.Epidemiology and infection · 2021Article
- Describing the indirect impact of COVID-19 on healthcare utilisation using syndromic surveillance systems.BMC public health · 2021Article
- Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Transmission in the United States Before Versus After Relaxation of Statewide Social Distancing Measures.Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America · 2021Article
- Impact of biometeorological conditions and air pollution on influenza-like illnesses incidence in Warsaw.International journal of biometeorology · 2021Article
- Sexually Transmitted Infection Diagnoses and Access to a Sexual Health Service Before and After the National Lockdown for COVID-19 in Melbourne, Australia.Open forum infectious diseases · 2021Article
- Article
- Social distancing to slow the US COVID-19 epidemic: Longitudinal pretest-posttest comparison group study.PLoS medicine · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundAs service provision and patient behaviour varies by day, healthcare data used for public health surveillance can exhibit large day of the week effects. These regular effects are further complicated by the impact of public holidays. Real-time syndromic surveillance requires the daily analysis of a range of healthcare data sources, including family doctor consultations (called general practitioners, or GPs, in the UK). Failure to adjust for such reporting biases during analysis of syndromic GP surveillance data could lead to misinterpretations including false alarms or delays in the detection of outbreaks. The simplest smoothing method to remove a day of the week effect from daily time series data is a 7-day moving average. Public Health England developed the working day moving average in an attempt also to remove public holiday effects from daily GP data. However, neither of these methods adequately account for the combination of day of the week and public holiday effects.
methodsThe extended working day moving average was developed. This is a further data-driven method for adding a smooth trend curve to a time series graph of daily healthcare data, that aims to take both public holiday and day of the week effects into account. It is based on the assumption that the number of people seeking healthcare services is a combination of illness levels/severity and the ability or desire of patients to seek healthcare each day. The extended working day moving average was compared to the seven-day and working day moving averages through application to data from two syndromic indicators from the GP in-hours syndromic surveillance system managed by Public Health England.
resultsThe extended working day moving average successfully smoothed the syndromic healthcare data by taking into account the combined day of the week and public holiday effects. In comparison, the seven-day and working day moving averages were unable to account for all these effects, which led to misleading smoothing curves.
conclusionsThe results from this study make it possible to identify trends and unusual activity in syndromic surveillance data from GP services in real-time independently of the effects caused by day of the week and public holidays, thereby improving the public health action resulting from the analysis of these data.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.