Healthcare refers to the processes involved in providing medical procedures such as surgery or the administering of medicine. These services are typically offered through a healthcare system composed of hospitals, physicians and technicians
Healthcare Challenges
- To optimise the scheduling of theatres, nurses and doctors
- To match the requirement for internal beds with A&E admissions and other demands
- To size the staff requirements (and shifts) in A&E to match variable demand
- To design priority rules on the waiting times of both the urgent and regular patients
- To respond to variable demand on A&E waiting times
- To size the staffing/skill/location requirements for Ambulance services to respond to patient requirements
- To understand the link between high dependency beds, wards, outpatients’ resources and low dependency beds in other facilities
OVERVIEW
BENEFITS
APPLICATIONS
OVERVIEW
Simulation in healthcare is a model linking patients, queues, beds, nurses/doctors, theaters and facilities such as x-Ray. It simulates patients moving from area to area. The model can imitate aspects such as: treatment times, shifts and outcomes. Data can be based on averages, real or on a statistical distribution, resembling the expected reality.
Simulation can deal with complicated interactions
BENEFITS
BEFORE YOU DO IT – MODEL IT
Simulation has achieved benefits such as:
- Decreased A&E queueing times by 20%
- Improved ambulance response times by 30%
- Increased availability of high dependency beds by 15% – through better patient journey
- Designed scheduling rules for theater increasing efficiency by 10%
- Arbitrated changes in work practices based on an objective methodology
- Proved a proposed change will work – often a model is used just to test a proposed system
APPLICATIONS
- A&E Design
- Theatre Scheduling
- Bed Management
- Resource Planning/Shift Planning
- Identifying Bottlenecks
- Patients Journey
- Priority Rules
- Linking all of the above