Simulating Bed Capacity: Evaluating the Impact of Healthcare Service Transfers

Abstract

Bed capacity management is an important factor in the effective provision of hospital services. Despite the prevalence of analytical tools suitable for this task, a barrier remains between the techniques available to operational researchers and strategic decision makers. In this paper we introduce a bespoke discrete event simulation package for the analysis of bed usage, which has been developed with a focus on usability and extendibility. A case study is presented for the transfer of Neurosurgery services between two sites, demonstrating the advantages of discrete event simulation over deterministic approaches which do not account for variation in the hospital system.