Bruce Pollack-Johnson
ABSTRACT
This paper describes a project to improve the patient transportation system (on gurneys and in wheelchairs) at a medium-sized Midwestern hospital. The hospital administration suspected that their use of nurses and technicians for transporting when Nursing Assistants (NA's) were busy was not cost-effective, and wanted to study the implications of several alternatives, including interdepartmental sharing of NA's. The system was modeled as a queueing network, broken into 3 subsystems, some of which were further subdivided by treatment type. Data were collected during a representative week, from which we derived distributions for arrival rates, urgency of cases, number of transporters needed, number of treatments needed, transportation time, and treatment time. We ran the simulation using SIMAN on an AT&T 6300, keeping track of patient time in the system and utilization of NA's, nurses, and technicians for each of the 4 major alternatives. We then presented these basic results to the hospital, along with our own judgments about the trade-offs between quality of patient service and cost for each alternative. The staff found both the basic data and the results of the simulation very useful, have acted upon some of our recommendations, and are utilizing our findings in their decision-making.
Index Terms
- Simulation of a hospital patient transportation system
Recommendations
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