Goal Programming for Optimal Allocation of Hospital Beds (Case Study: Emergency Department of Shahid Madani Hospital in Tabriz)

In today’s competitive markets, customer satisfaction is the main goal for all managers, and at a hospital what the most adapted bed allocation policy is, a research subject is for many researchers to gain more customer satisfaction. Researchers have presented a variety of methods on allocating beds to the patients, based on their type of customers and problems. In this paper, goal programming method was proposed for optimal allocation of hospital beds. The proposed method was applied to the case study of Emergency Department of Shahid Madani Hospital in Tabriz, Iran. In this study in order to optimize the allocation of beds in the department, four goals are targeted: minimize the time taken of the bed by the patient, minimize the waiting time, maximize the use of human potential energy, and minimize the number of empty beds. The obtained results from case study were analyzed, finally.