[Statistical study of workload at a birthing unit]

The work consists of a statistical study of the workload on a labour ward. This included a study of the admission/birth frequency and an investigation of the factors that influenced the process of admissions and the time spent on the ward. Also the relation between the number of midwives and women in labour present on the ward was investigated. It was found that the variation in the number of spontaneous admissions/births could be described reasonably well by a Poisson distribution. A simple statistical model was proposed to calculate the number of midwives necessary at any given birth frequency. For a specific choice of parameters the model fitted the actual distribution very well. The relative frequency of complications was highest for women with no previous births and smallest for women with one previous birth. The time spent on the labour ward depended significantly on the number of times the woman had given birth before and on whether the present delivery was complicated.