District Hospital Trauma Mental Health Screening Night-Shift Triage Decision-Making and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Referral Disparities in Ethiopian Clinics: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Temporal Decision Boundaries

Night-shift triage in Ethiopian district hospitals concentrates trauma mental health screening into a temporal window whose boundaries are set by staffing rotas rather than clinical need. The indicator is used here as a calibration benchmark for the distributional behaviour of a gendered decision-making measure in African survey data, not as an outcome of the triage framework. The paper specifies the running variable, the cutoff, the bandwidth, the local linear estimator and the manipulation and covariate-balance diagnostics that a district-hospital evaluation would require, and it states the assumptions under which the resulting discontinuity would be interpretable as a shift in referral practice rather than a shift in case mix. The contribution is a pre-specified design template that makes the temporal boundary itself the object of inference, together with an explicit account of why the DHS calibration matters for power and for the interpretation of gendered decision-making measures in African health systems.