A QUEUING MODEL FOR HOSPITAL BED OCCUPANCY MANAGEMENT FOR TWO LARGE WARDS OF A HOSPITAL

Abstract

The quality of medical service at the orthopedic clinic of the NKST Rehabilitation Hospital, Mkar, Benue State, Nigeria is constantly threatened by the inadequacy of hospital beds across wards. This is due to the high influx of patients needing these specialized healthcare services. The optimal number of beds required in each ward to ensure patients are not turned away and beds are not underutilized has not been previously determined scientifically. The consequence of patients being turned away is the loss of revenue for this hospital. This work addressed this problem via the analytical queuing modeling approach. The queuing model employed is the M/EK/C model and it has been able to determine the optimal number of beds required in the wards, successfully reducing the number of patients turned away from the wards and the revenue loss on the part of the hospital. Though the model has been able to solve the problem of patients being 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 the wards. The optimal number of beds for the wards Chile and Dooase are number respectively 86 and 105, while the mean number of empty beds is respectively 30 and 25.