Working with Capacity Limitations: Operations Management in Critical Care
16 Pages Posted: 21 Apr 2011
Date Written: April 19, 2011
Abstract
As your hospital’s intensive care unit (ICU) director you are approached by the hospital’s administration to help solve ongoing problems with ICU throughput. The ICU seems to be full all the time, and trauma patients in the emergency department sometimes wait up to 24 hours before receiving a bed. At the same time, the cardiac surgeons were forced to canceled several elective coronary-artery bypass graft cases because there was not a bed available for post-operative recovery. The hospital administrators ask if you can decrease your ICU length of stay, and wonder if they should build more ICU beds instead. For help in understanding and optimizing your ICU’s throughput, you seek out the operations management researchers at your university.
Keywords: Patient Flow, Critical Care, Capacity Mangement
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