ISSN: 2222-6990
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The emergency department is the patients’ main entrance to the hospital, which operates 24 hours a week to treat various types of illnesses categorized as emergencies. Therefore, many patients tend to seek treatment in this department, especially after office hours. The main function of the emergency department is to treat critical or semi critical cases. Nevertheless, this department has also become a place to treat patients with non-critical cases. The presence of a high number of patients every day has caused the emergency department to often face overcrowding. Realizing this fact, the management needs to curb this issue as soon as possible. Therefore, this paper discusses the application of the Discrete Event Simulation approach in modeling the daily operation of the Green Zone of the emergency department under study. The simulation model was developed using Arena simulation software to understand the behaviors of the system operation. Besides, from the simulation model, the management can identify the bottlenecks of the system which contribute to the high patients’ waiting time and length of stay as well as the utilization rate of the resources. The simulation outputs show that waiting for available resources is the main issue that creates overcrowding in the waiting area of the Green Zone. A few alternative solutions were designed and discussed with the management of the emergency department for possible improvements. The results from the improvement model show a significant reduction in a patient’s waiting time as well as a patient’s length of stay. This improvement model also stabilized the utilization rate of the involved resources.
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