Track: Simulation and PLM Competition

Abstract

It is important to effectively manage the allocation of limited resources such as beds in order to provide access to care in a timely manner. Bed capacity management is essential in delivering low cost and high-quality health care. The behavior of how a hospital operated must be understood in detail to utilize beds efficiently. This understanding is crucial when it comes to making changes in resources, shifts, etc. as it can improve the medical service introduced to the patient. This research mainly focuses on developing a discrete event simulation to help and support in decision making on scheduling staff and optimizing resources. The patients flow through all the hospital was analyzed and the hospital’s system as a whole excluding pediatrics it has a separate emergency department and obstetrics and gynecology since it. Many scenarios were tested to find out the effect of length of stay, queue length and waiting times of patients. Data required to build the model like patients’ length of stay, available resources, and processing times were collected from a public hospital. After building the model, verifying and validating it, performing experimental designs, and doing several runs, the results were found to be that the bottlenecks in the system is resulting from the over occupancy in wards (especially surgical wards) that is affecting the patient flow and overcrowding in the Emergency Department.