An approach by human and material resources combination to reduce hospitals crowding

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to propose an approach by human and material resources combination to reduce hospitals crowding. Hospitals crowding is becoming a serious problem. Many research works present several methods and approaches to deal with this problem. However, to the best of the authors’ knowledge – after a deep reading of literature – in all the proposed approaches, human and material resources are studied separately while they must be combined (to a given number of material resources an optimal number of human resources must be assigned and vice versa) to reflect reality and provide better results.

Design/methodology/approach

Hospital inpatient unit is chosen as framework. This unit crowding reduction is carried out by its capacity increasing. Indeed, inpatient unit modeling is performed to find the adequate combinations of human and material resources numbers insuring this unit stability and providing optimal service rates. At first, inpatient unit is modeled using queuing networks and considering only two resources (beds and nurses). Then, the obtained service rate formula is improved by including other resources and parameters using Baskett, Chandy, Muntz and Palecios (BCMP) queuing networks. This work is applied to “Princess Lalla Meryem” hospital inpatient unit.

Findings

Results are patients’ average number reduction by an average (in each block) of three patients, patients’ average waiting time reduction by an average of 9.98 h and non-admitted patients (to inpatient wards) access percentage of 39.26 per cent on average.

Originality/value

Previous works focus their studies on either human resources or material resources. Only a few works study both resources types, but separately. The context of those studies does not meet the real hospital context (where human resources are combined with material resources). Therefore, the provided results are not very reliable. In this paper, an approach by human and material resources combination is proposed to increase inpatient unit care capacity. Indeed, this approach consists of developing inpatient unit service rate formula in terms of human and material resources numbers.

Citation

Jebbor, S., El Afia, A. and Chiheb, R. (2019), "An approach by human and material resources combination to reduce hospitals crowding", International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications, Vol. 15 No. 2, pp. 58-79. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPCC-06-2019-058