SUBJECTS: Maths
YEARS: 7–8, 9–10
Overcrowding in hospitals is one of the biggest challenges facing our healthcare system.
In order to reduce hospital waiting times, the Patient Admission Prediction Tool (PAPT) uses historical data to predict how many patients, and with what kinds of injuries, are expected to arrive at the emergency department each day of the year.
This video shows the experience of one hospital in Queensland, where the staff use the PAPT to make the care they provide more efficient.
Things to think about
- 1.As well as in hospitals, there are many other situations in which estimates and approximations are used. These values are sometimes used for making important decisions. Can you suggest some other examples of situations where estimates might be used? How accurate do they need to be?
- 2.What types of calculation or mathematical tools does the hospital staff use to make their predictions? Do you think that the PAPT generally makes accurate estimates? For what purposes might the hospital administrators use these predictions? How important are these for helping patients?
- 3.Find a desk. Estimate its height in centimetres (correct to the nearest centimetre). Estimate the height of your teacher in centimetres (correct to the nearest centimetre). Record your results in a table and calculate the absolute error for each, using "+" for an overestimate and "–" for an underestimate. Make a table to show how many students overestimated, how many underestimated and how many estimated correctly.
- 4.What strategies did you use to make your estimates? Which of your two estimates do you think is more accurate? Why? Suppose a student overestimated both heights by 3 centimetres. Which estimate is better? Explain. Assume nobody in your class estimated both heights correctly. How could we choose the best estimator from your class?
Acknowledgements
Video © UTS Maths Inside.
Production Date: 2017
Copyright
Metadata © Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Education Services Australia Ltd 2012 (except where otherwise indicated). Digital content © Australian Broadcasting Corporation (except where otherwise indicated). Video © Australian Broadcasting Corporation (except where otherwise indicated). All images copyright their respective owners. Text © Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Education Services Australia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0).