OBJECTIVES To develop a mathematical model for simulating the daily bed occupancy in an intensive care unit. DESIGN Data collection and retrospective analysis to develop a mathematical model for simulating daily bed occupancy in an intensive care unit. SETTING We studied all admissions to the intensive care unit at the Hospital of Navarra over a 9-yr period. PATIENTS Six-thousand three-hu...

Background Policy makers require information on costs related to inpatient and outpatient health services to inform resource allocation decisions. Methods Country data sets were gathered in 2008-2010 through literature reviews, website searches and a public call for cost data. Multivariate regression analysis was used to explore the determinants of variability in unit costs using data from 30...

THE census of all patients in psychiatric hospitals and units in England and Wales (Brooke, 1967) showed that the rundown of this inpatient population, as forecast by Tooth and Brooke (1961), was being maintained in 1963. Since then other studies (Lancet leading article, 1969) have confirmed this continuing trend, although the rate of decline obviously varies from area to area. In the Birmingha...

Ten hand-touch sites were screened weekly on two surgical wards over two consecutive six-month periods. The results were analysed using hygiene standards, which specify (i) an aerobic colony count (ACC) > 2.5 cfu/cm(2), and (ii) presence of coagulase-positive staphylococci, as hygiene failures. Sites most often failing the standards were beds and hoist (64%: 33 of 52 weeks), bedside lockers (62...

The lack of adequate numbers of hospital beds to accommodate the injured is a main problem in public hospitals. For control of occupancy of bed, we design a dynamic system that announces status of bed when it change with admission or discharge of a patient. This system provide a wide network in country for bed management, especially for ICU and CCU beds that help us to distribute injured patien...

Background – In the interest of efficiently using limited resources, it is important to optimize the throughput of cardiac surgery patients. Accordingly, the present study was performed to estimate the bed occupancy rate and throughput of patients in cardiac surgery departments using simulation models. Methods – In this paper, the typical Heart Surgery Department of Freeman Hospital in Newcastl...

OBJECTIVES To describe the components of an emergency and urgent care system within one health authority and to investigate ways in which patient flows and system capacity could be improved. METHODS Using a qualitative system dynamics (SD) approach, data from interviews were used to build a conceptual map of the system illustrating patient pathways from entry to discharge. The map was used to...