Simulation modeling for predicting hospital admissions and bed utilisation

Demographic research of the world population shows that societies are ageing. The ongoing changes in the population structure will require appropriate quantitative and qualitative adjustments in health services to meet the needs of society. Simulation methods turn out to be helpful in these kinds of analyses. In this paper, the authors present a case study on using discrete event simulation (DES) to support decision-making in the field of hospital bed management in the light of demographic changes. The case study was elaborated for one of the Polish district hospitals. A DES model was built to simulate admissions to two hospital wards: paediatric and geriatric. A series of experiments were carried out as based on real data extracted from the hospital database and forecasted demographic trends elaborated by the Central Statistical Office of Poland (CSO). The influence of demographic changes on hospital admissions in the chosen age-gender cohorts was explored, examining different variants of hospital bed availability. The results of the experiments show that demographic trends significantly influence healthcare admission and bed utilisation. The reduction in the number of admissions to the paediatric ward by about 6% results in a change in average bed utilisation from 57.90% to 54.06%. With about 12% more admissions to the geriatric ward, the change is from 68.88% to 75.59%.