A Queuing Model for Hospital Bed Occupancy Management: A Case Study

Abstract

The quality of Medical Service in the Orthopaedic clinic of the NKST Rehabilitation Hospital Mkar is constantly threatened by the inadequacy of hospital beds across wards. This is due to the high influx of patients needing this specialized healthcare service. The optimal number of beds required in each ward to ensure patients are not turned away and beds are not underutilized has not been determined scientifically. It is important to mention that the consequence of patients being turned away is the loss of revenue to this hospital and frustration on the part of patients. This paper has been able to address this problem via the analytical queuing modeling approach. The queuing model has been able to determine the optimal number of beds required in the wards, successfully ensured that no patient is turned away from the wards and no revenue is lost. Though the model has being able to solve the problem of patients been turned away from the wards and that of revenue loss, it is not without the challenges of coping with the holding cost of empty beds across as the wards. The optimal number of beds for the wards (Private, Alam, Chile and Dooase) are respectively 85, 99, 86 and 105, while the mean number of empty beds is respectively 22, 24, 30 and 25.