ArticleHealth services insights2024
Procedure Prioritization During a Nationwide Ban on Non-Urgent Healthcare: A Quasi-Experimental Retrospective Study of Hospital Data in Switzerland.
Article in Health services insights, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
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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.
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Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Costs of hospital stays in Switzerland during the COVID-19 pandemic: a comparative analysis between cancer and non-cancer patients.BMC health services research · 2026Observational
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5 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Background: During the COVID-19 lockdown in spring 2020, Switzerland restricted non-urgent healthcare services to safeguard capacity. While prioritization of care was supposed to be driven by medical urgency, demographic factors or economic incentives might have influenced the hospitals' resource allocation decisions. Objectives: This study investigates potential determinants of procedure prioritization in hospitalized patients during the lockdown period. Design: Quasi-experimental retrospective study of hospital data in Switzerland. Methods: We analyzed 496 456 adult patients with known insurance status and a recorded procedure, admitted for cardiovascular, orthopedic/musculoskeletal or oncological reasons from January 2017 (3 years before the COVID-19 outbreak) to mid-April 2020 (in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic), to obtain admission rate ratios (ARRs, "lockdown" admission rates divided by "normal" rates) from negative binomial regression analysis of fortnightly admissions for frequent procedure-diagnosis combinations. Quade and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests compared ARRs between sex×age, insurance and comorbidity strata. Results: Admission rates showed significant reductions for 29 of 53 procedure-diagnosis combinations. Reductions varied strongly by emergency, with largest decreases in orthopedic procedures for arthrosis (osteoarthritis) and non-arthritic joint disorders, and the smallest in cerebral imaging for stroke patients and surgical procedures for malignant neoplasms. The only difference in ARRs between strata was a stronger decrease in admission rates for cardiovascular combinations for patients with private versus basic health insurance. Conclusion: While medical procedures were affected to varying degrees by the ban on non-urgent healthcare during the COVID-19 lockdown, we found no robust evidence that factors other than medical urgency influenced healthcare prioritization.
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