From Hospital Plans to Computer Simulation: A Case Study of the Alfred Centre

摘要

The work reported in this paper was commissioned by The Alfred Hospital, one of Melbourne's major public hospitals. The brief was to build a simulation model from the plans for the Alfred Centre, which would be an elective 'walk-in, walkout investigative, diagnostic and treatment facility. The client wished to know whether the three Post Anaesthetic Care Units proposed for the new Centre would cope with the flow of patients from the Theatres, Endoscopy Rooms and the Cardiac Catheter Lab. There were two important factors to be considered. The first was that, whereas these three streams of patient care had previously had their own PACU facilities, in the new centre they would be combined. Secondly, the greater operational efficiencies expected of the new Centre made estimating patient flow difficult. The model indicated that under certain scenarios PACU capacity was insufficient to deal with expected patient flow.