Employment of emergency advanced nurses of Turkey: A discrete-event simulation application

Abstract

In the present study, problems in emergency services (ESs) were dealt with by analyzing the working system of ESs in Turkey. The purpose of this study was to reduce the waiting times spent in hospitals by employing advanced nurses (ANs) to treat patients who are not urgent, or who may be treated as outpatients in ESs. By applying discrete-event simulation on a 1/24 (daily) and 7/24 (weekly) basis, and by employing ANs, it was determined that the number of patients that were treated increased by 26.71% on a 1/24 basis, and by 15.13% on a 7/24 basis. The waiting time that was spent from the admission to the ES until the treatment time decreased by 38.67% on a 1/24 basis and 53.66% on a 24/7 basis. Similarly, the length of stay was reduced from 82.46 min to 53.97 min in the ES. Among the findings, it was observed that the efficiency rate of the resources was balanced by the employment of ANs, although it was not possible to obtain sufficient efficiency from the resources used in the ESs prior to the present study.