TITLE:
Nurse Staff Allocation in a Multi-stage Queuing System with Patients’ Feedback Flow for an Outpatient Department
AUTHORS:
Huabo Zhu, Jiafu Tang, Jun Gong
KEYWORDS:
Queuing; Nurse Staff Allocation; Healthcare; Simulated Annealing
JOURNAL NAME:
iBusiness,
Vol.5 No.3B,
November
8,
2013
ABSTRACT: A general multi-stage queuing system
model with patients’ feedback
flow is developed to address the behavior of patients’ flow in an Outpatient
Department (OD) in a hospital. The whole process includes registration, diagnosis, chemical
examination, payment, and medicine-taking. Focusing on nurse resources, the
formulas of performance indicators such as patient waiting times and nurse idle times are derived by using the system
parameters. A mathematical programming model is developed to determine how many
nurses should be allocated to each stage to minimize the total costs of patient
waiting times and nurse idle times. The neighborhood search combined Simulated Annealing (NS-SA)
is developed to solve the model, which is essentially a natural number
decomposition problem. Numerical experiments are conducted to analyze the
discipline of nurse allocation and the impact of patient arrival rates and the probability of
patient’s feedback flow on the system costs. The research results will be
helpful for hospital
managers to make decisions on allocation of nurse staff in practice.