Bed capacity and surgical waiting lists: a simulation analysis

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Published: Dec 30, 2015

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Manel Antelo
Universidad de Santiago de Compostela
Spain
Biography
Francisco Reyes Santias
University of Vigo
Spain
Adela Martinez Calvo
University of Santiago de Compostela
Spain
Vol. 4 No. 2 (2015), Articles, pages 118-133
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17979/ejge.2015.4.2.4310
Submitted: Sep 24, 2018 Published: Dec 30, 2015
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Abstract

Waiting time for elective surgery is a key problem in the current medical world. This paper aims to reproduce, by a Monte Carlo simulation model, the relationship between hospital capacity, inpatient activity, and surgery waiting list size in teaching hospitals. Inpatient activity is simulated by fitting a Normal distribution to real inpatient activity data, and the effect of the number of beds on inpatient activity is modelled with a linear regression model. Analysis is performed with data of the University Multi-Hospital Complex of Santiago de Compostela (Santiago de Compostela, Spain), by considering two scenarios regarding the elastiticity of demand with bed increase. If demand does not grow with an increase on bed capacity, small changes lead to drastic reductions in the waiting lists. However, if demand grows as bed capacity does, adding additional capacity merely makes waiting lists worse.

Keywords:

Hospital beds, inpatient activity, length of stay, Monte Carlo simulation, surgery waiting lists

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