Correcting for day of the week and public holiday effects: improving a national daily syndromic surveillance service for detecting public health threats

BMC Public Health
Elizabeth Buckingham-JefferyGillian E Smith

Abstract

As 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. The 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 ...Continue Reading

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Citations

Jun 18, 2020·Journal of the Royal Society, Interface·Solveig EngebretsenBirgitte Freiesleben de Blasio
Aug 6, 2020·Frontiers in Public Health·Peter J Mallow, Michael Jones
Jul 28, 2019·International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health·Yanran HuangJian Wang
Oct 4, 2020·Clinical Infectious Diseases : an Official Publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America·Alexander C TsaiMark J Siedner
Jan 18, 2021·International Journal of Biometeorology·Katarzyna Lindner-Cendrowska, Peter Bröde

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