Title :
Quality improvement for the Campbelltown hospital emergency service
Author :
Liyanage, Liwan ; Gale, Mark
Author_Institution :
Western Sydney Univ., Macarthur Cambelltown, NSW, Australia
Abstract :
In this study the theory of queueing models has been applied to design an appropriate service facility for the Campbelltown hospital emergency service in order to minimise patients waiting time and the associated running cost. Thus the ultimate goal is to optimize the available resources. A computer program is developed to model the distributions of arrival time, waiting time and service time of the system and to estimate their parameters. These parameters are then used to develop a simulation algorithm that estimates the average waiting time for other parametric changes such as arrival rate and the number of servers in the system. Observing how these parametric changes will effect the expected waiting time of the patients and the expected idle time of the doctors this program can be used to design a more efficient system. Hence this will provide a valuable tool for the managers and doctors in scheduling, in order to optimize the efficiency of the emergency service
Keywords :
emergency services; health care; medical administrative data processing; operations research; optimisation; queueing theory; Campbelltown hospital; computer program; emergency service; optimization; parameter estimation; parametric changes; patients waiting time; queueing models; running cost; scheduling; service facility; simulation algorithm; Algorithm design and analysis; Australia; Computational modeling; Cost function; Design optimization; Distributed computing; Emergency services; Hospitals; Parameter estimation; Queueing analysis;
Conference_Titel :
Systems, Man and Cybernetics, 1995. Intelligent Systems for the 21st Century., IEEE International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Vancouver, BC
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-2559-1
DOI :
10.1109/ICSMC.1995.538071