Assessing the Performance of Hospital Capacity Planning Through Simulation Analysis

Hospital capacity planning at the tactical level produces the optimal patient case mix that can be taken care of at a hospital with the associated time-phased allocation of resources. However, different generated scenarios may result in dissimilar effects on the delivery of health care when variability comes into play. Therefore, it is important to evaluate the performance of capacity planning through simulation analysis. In our setting, the daily booked surgical inpatients are always operated on but possibly are misplaced in an alternative area for recovery because of a bed shortage in the suitable ward, while the bed shortage is the consequence of fluctuating lengths of stay of the patients. Patient misplacement is the chief performance indicator to reflect the service level. Two aspects are studied intensively in this paper. On the one hand, in order to reduce the bed shortage maximally, a few strategies are suggested when determining the capacity decisions. Then, the impacts of different strategies are compared on bed occupancy and patient misplacement. On the other hand, sensitivity analysis is carried out to check whether the number 2 of patient misplacements can be reduced and whether the bed shortage phenomenon can be mitigated