Dictionary

[PeterSNHS]

Centralised dictionary with mathematical (and qualitative) definitions of terms and their associated functions collated into one place to avoid confusion of similar terms.

[ThomUK]

This would be a good vignette (which come into their own once we have the pkgdown site rendered into a docs website)

[PeterSNHS]

Also necessary: specify units to be used throughout. Currently functions just refer to things like "demand" - since demand is a rate, need to specify the denominator. I assume it's whatever units the target wait is given as, i.e. if target wait is in weeks then demand is n / week.

[ThomUK]

I agree. There is a design decision here about whether to choose a unit, or stay unitless.

• Standardising on "week" makes everything simpler, but harder to use if your ideal unit would be days, or months (how many weeks in a month?).
• Unitless makes things more flexible for differing use-cases, but needs careful documentation. Thinking ahead, we might also need to consume a "unit" argument somewhere in order to make the axes of some of the visuals make sense.

[PeterSNHS]

Agreed, I would tend towards unitless for flexibility - not every service has data more granular than monthly.

[ThomUK]

Just documenting the agreement we made today. Let's stay dimensionless for use-case flexibility, and add dimensions in for the plotting functions if needed later.

[ThomUK]

Issue #22 was created as a result of this discussion. I'm closing the discussion here as a result. Thanks @PeterSNHS!