Computer Simulation in Health Care Service: The Emergency Department of CUH

In the health care service is important to minimize staff idle time and patient waiting time maintaining a high utilization rate of medical facilities. Some hospitals have insufficient resources. Many hospitals have inefficient ways to use them. In order to respond to the growing number of incoming patients, hospital departments, including emergency rooms, have to re-evaluate their current facilities, procedures and practises from an operations management perspective. Computer simulation is recognized as a powerful tool, for medical management, to improve productivity while increasing service level to patients. This paper presents some observations arising from the development of a case study in the public health care system. An optimal layout design and process configuration in the Emergency Department (ED) of the Cork University Hospital (CUH) – Ireland was developed and tested. Through a discrete event simulation model of the ED, bottlenecks were analysed and a new system configuration was proposed. An optimising procedure based on Simulated Annealing (SA) methodology, group technology approach and axiomatic design procedures was employed into layout analysis. The performance of the implemented model was evaluated in terms of mean patient’s waiting time, resource (static and staff) utilization, service level to patients and managerial costs.