Simulating hospital patient flow for insight and improvement

Clissold, A., Filar, J., Mackay, M., Qin, S. and Ward, D.

It is a well-known problem that Australian public hospitals are struggling to meet the increasing inpatient care demand, which often results to patient flow congestion and poor health care outcomes. Health care management practitioners and researchers have been trying to improve overall flow of patients with various modelling and data analysis approaches. The implementation and uptake of modelling as part of normal hospital management practice has, however, not been overly successful to date for a variety of reasons. Consequently, there remains a gap between the development of models and the buy-in from health care professionals in using them for management decision-making. This paper shares our recent experience of creating a discrete event based simulation model of patient flow in Flinders Medical Centre (FMC) that accurately describes the progression of patients through the emergency department (ED) into wards and then discharge. It describes the development of various aspects of the simulation, including data preparation, arrival patterns, queuing, ward allocation, weekend discharge delay, and model validation. The model has been used to test the impact of the likely increased ED arrivals arising from proposed Government policy change. It will be used to investigate other scenarios and strategies for improving patient flow through the hospital and reducing waiting times in the emergency department. The animated visual representation of such simulation has proven to be an effective way to engage hospital staff, which should lead to better buy-in of improvement changes.

Cite as: Clissold, A., Filar, J., Mackay, M., Qin, S. and Ward, D. (2015). Simulating hospital patient flow for insight and improvement. In Proc. 8th Australasian Workshop on Health Informatics and Knowledge Management (HIKM 2015) Sydney, Australia. CRPIT, 164. Maeder, A. and Warren, J. Eds., ACS. 15-23

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