Queueing Analysis of Patient Flow in Hospital

Abstract

Waiting on a queue is not usually interesting, but reduction in this waiting time usually requires planning and extra investments. The increasing population and health-need due to adverse environmental conditions have led to escalating waiting times and congestion in hospitals especially in the Emergency and Accident Departments (EAD). It is universally acknowledged that a hospital should treat its patients, especially those in need of critical care, in timely manner. Incidentally, this is not achieved in practice particularly in government owned health institutions because of high demand and limited resources in these hospitals. To enhance the level of admittance to care, optimal beds required in hospital is needed and this can be achieved by adequate knowledge of patient flow. In this paper, we show that queue theory can accurately model the flow of in-patient in hospital; we determine the optimal bed count and its performance measure.