Managing surgical waiting lists through dynamic priority scoring.

Prioritising elective surgery patients under the Australian three-category system is inherently subjective due to variability in clinician decision making and the potential for extraneous factors to influence category assignment. As a result, waiting time inequities can exist which may lead to adverse health outcomes and increased morbidity, especially for patients deemed to be low priority. This study investigated the use of a dynamic priority scoring (DPS) system to rank elective surgery patients more equitably, based on a combination of waiting time and clinical factors. Such a system enables patients to progress on the waiting list in a more objective and transparent manner, at a rate relative to their clinical need. Simulation results comparing the two systems indicate that the DPS system has potential to assist in managing waiting lists by standardising waiting times relative to urgency category, in addition to improving waiting time consistency for patients of similar clinical need. In clinical practice, this system is likely to reduce subjectivity, increase transparency, and improve overall efficiency of waiting list management by providing an objective metric to prioritise patients. Such a system is also likely to increase public trust and confidence in the systems used to manage waiting lists.

Finding Ernst Mayr's Plato.

Many biologists have accepted Ernst Mayr's claim that evolutionary biology undermined an essentialist or typological view of species that had its roots in Platonic philosophy. However, Mayr has been accused of failing to support with textual evidence his attributions to Plato of these sorts of views about biology. Contemporary work in history and philosophy of biology often seems to take onboard Mayr's account of Plato's view of species. This paper seeks to provide a critical account of putative inconsistencies between an evolutionary view of species and Platonic philosophy with renewed attention to the Platonic texts in light of recent Plato scholarship; I argue that claims that Plato held an essentialist view of species inconsistent with evolutionary biology are inadequately supported by textual evidence. If Mayr's essentialist thesis fails, one might think that the intuition that Platonic philosophy is in tension with Darwinian evolution could nonetheless be accounted for by Plato's apparent privileging of a certain sort of teleological explanation, a thesis that Mayr suggests in his 1959 paper on Louis Agassiz. However, this thesis also faces difficulties. Ernst Mayr's Plato is more likely to be found in the writings of anti-evolutionary 19th century biologists like Mayr's frequent target, Agassiz, than in a cautious reading of the Platonic dialogues themselves. Interlocutors in discussions of the history of biological thought and classificatory methods in biology should be cautious in ascribing views about biology to Plato and using terms like "Platonic essentialism."