Adjusting Daily Inpatient Bed Allocation to Smooth Emergency Department Occupancy Variation
| Autor: | Shih-Chia Liu, Seung-Hwan Kim, Shao-Jen Weng, Chih-Hao Chen, Jeffrey Che-Hung Tsai, Chun-An Chou, Yao-Te Tsai, Donald F. Gotcher |
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| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
Occupancy
inpatient bed allocation Leadership and Management business.industry overcrowding Health Policy lcsh:R lcsh:Medicine 030208 emergency & critical care medicine Health Informatics Emergency department Overcrowding Article Standard deviation 03 medical and health sciences 0302 clinical medicine discrete-event simulation Health Information Management Statistics Resource allocation Medicine 030212 general & internal medicine General hospital emergency department operations business |
| Zdroj: | Healthcare Healthcare, Vol 8, Iss 78, p 78 (2020) Volume 8 Issue 2 |
| ISSN: | 2227-9032 |
| DOI: | 10.3390/healthcare8020078 |
| Popis: | Study Objective: Overcrowding in emergency departments (ED) is an increasingly common problem in Taiwanese hospitals, and strategies to improve efficiency are in demand. We propose a bed resource allocation strategy to overcome the overcrowding problem. Method: We investigated ED occupancy using discrete-event simulation and evaluated the effects of suppressing day-to-day variations in ED occupancy by adjusting the number of empty beds per day. Administrative data recorded at the ED of Taichung Veterans General Hospital (TCVGH) in Taiwan with 1500 beds and an annual ED volume of 66,000 visits were analyzed. Key indices of ED quality in the analysis were the length of stay and the time in waiting for outward transfers to in-patient beds. The model is able to analyze and compare several scenarios for finding a feasible allocation strategy. Results: We compared several scenarios, and the results showed that by reducing the allocated beds for the ED by 20% on weekdays, the variance of daily ED occupancy was reduced by 36.25% (i.e., the percentage of reduction in standard deviation). Conclusions: This new allocation strategy was able to both reduce the average ED occupancy and maintain the ED quality indices. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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