Deciding the minimum staffing level in an emergency medical center during sandstorms

This paper presents a case study of a discreteevent simulation (DES) model of an emergency department (ED) unit in a governmental hospital in Kuwait. The emergency department operations were modeled using Arena software. The simulation model was reinforced through verification and validation. Some scenarios in an attempt to determine the minimum staff level were evaluated. These scenarios show that major improvement in patient waiting time can be obtained by minor changes in the number of resources. These changes reduced the waiting times of patients by 29% in the Female Observation, by 62% in the Male Observation, by 15% in the first Examination Room, and by 23% in the second Examination Room. The relationship between sandstorm occurrences and the number of visits to the emergency department was also investigated using correlation and regression analysis. The result of the analysis was that there is a strong linear relationship between sandstorm occurrences and the number of visits to the emergency department.