Waiting for the newest referrals

Referrals should be coming in soon and this is the first batch in a long time that our agency has a group that is expecting babies. This group was logged in on September 12, 2005. Their wait from LID to referral will be just under 16 months.

RQ has recently released a new poll. I love data. This LID poll goes through September 2006. The results are lumped into months rather than days, so it took me some time to tease them apart.

My first assumption is that the rate of the past two months of LIDs referred will stay constant. ie. it took X number of days to include Y number of referrals in a batch. This assumption is most likely incorrect, but, since I'm not psychic, it's the best foundation to start from.

My second assumption is that the same percentage of people who were LID recently took RQ's poll as the number of people LID a long time ago. ie. the longer you're in the process, the more likely you are to know about RQ and her poll. I started to work on the increase of people per month to her site to artificially inflate the numbers as they go out into the future (since RQ recently gave us some data about the number of unique viewers, hits, etc. on her site by month), but I realized that there are too many factors that increase communication and it wouldn't be very reliable. Instead, it's easier to just look at the data and know that the further you go out, the more optimistic the dates.

Oh, I forgot, I have one more assumption (geez with all of these assumptions, the outcome can't be too reliable, but ... it's fun, and it will be fun to see the pattern over time, especially since we're in for a 2+ year wait). Okay, my third assumption is that referrals are sent out once per month, so when I say "January 2007", I mean the referrals that come out the beginning of that month, or sometimes the end of the previous month. So, if the CCAA decides to do two batches in a month, or one batch in 6 weeks, it will throw it off. However, I would imagine that they still match roughly the same number of babies per month, regardless of how quickly or slowly they do it.

So, here's my latest predictions based on RQ's poll ending 12.22.2006.



The RED dates are those that include one of our agency's groups. The August 2008 referrals I made up because I ran out of data, but I wanted to squeeze another group on the table.

By creating this prediction, I'm not discounting my previous predictions, I'm just adding more data to the mix. The CCAA controls how many babies they match. There are so many factors that affect this, that there are forums to discuss the speculations. I would post my belief of why the CCAA has slowed down here, but I'm not ready to turn this blog into a forum of sorts. For now, I enjoy sitting back, watching the recent changes and how they are affecting the timeline.