Improving the Hospital Quality of Care during Winter Periods by Optimizing Budget Allocation Between Rotavirus Vaccination and Bed Expansion

Dort, Thibaut; Schecroun, Nadia; Standaert, Baudouin

When considering decreasing returns to scale with a ¼ b ¼ 0:45 (panel IV), the optimal values of prevention and treatment needed to reach the same QoC-score improvement of 50% are 98.09% vaccine coverage and 60.79% extra beds (i.e., a 54.45% relative increase for both). In contrast, considering increasing returns to scale with a ¼ b ¼ 0:55 (panel V) imply a relative decrease of 29.93%, from 63.51 to 44.51% and from 39.36 to 27.58% in the optimal values of V and H, respectively. Considering a higher contribution of V versus H and increasing returns to scale with a ¼ 0:55 and b ¼ 0:5 (panel VI) imply a V value of 54.54% and an H value of 30.73%, i.e., a lower relative decrease in optimal vaccine coverage. (a and b) . The budget-minimizing allocation is presented between rotavirus vaccination and rotavirus gastroenteritis treatment for each of the six scenarios of the sensitivity analysis. a and b the relative contribution parameters of prevention and treatment, respectively, QoC hospital quality of care score In all scenarios the same evolution is observed as in Fig. 2 , with a much steeper budget rise (solid curves) for increases of H than for increases in V, when deviating from the optimal combination (shown on the dashed curves).