Application of discrete-event simulation in acute care´s capacity analysis

Deploying nurses based on fixed shift could mitigate scarce availability during peak now of patients, but idle time should be resolved. This paper presents the analysis of nurses scheduling for minimal cost and reduced patient waiting time. An acute care unit of a local hospital is thecase study. The main sources to collect the data are historical data of patients´ medical records as well as staff activity reports of their daily duty. Arena simulation software is applied to identify an optimum nurse scheduling. A base case model is built and several scenarios with different schedules and resources are compared: the results of these scenarios such as total pay cost and the resource utilization implied an optimal solution. A three shift system that comprises of all registered nurses, reducing the number of chest pain outpatients´ rooms. and increasing the common rooms results optimal.