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Journal of Applied Sciences

Year: 2013 | Volume: 13 | Issue: 15 | Page No.: 2884-2890
DOI: 10.3923/jas.2013.2884.2890
Nurses Staffing and Allocation in Multi-stage Queueing Network with I2 Patients’ Routing for Outpatient Department
Huabo Zhu, Jiafu Tang and Jun Gong

Abstract: A general multi-stage queuing network model with I2 patients’ routing including two tandem queues is established to formulate the behavior of patients flow in Outpatient Department (OD) in a hospital starting from registration, diagnosis, chemical examination, referral, payment and medicine-taking. Focusing on the nurse resources, the formula of performance indicators such as patient’ waiting time, probability of nurse’ idle are derived by using the system parameters. A mathematical programming model is developed to determine how many nurses are needed and how to allocate to each stage/division to minimize the total costs of patients’ waiting time and the nurses’ idle time. How to allocate the nurse to each stage is essentially a natural number decomposition problem and thus a neighborhood search combined Simulated Annealing (NS-SA) with Heuristic is developed. Optimal nurse numbers are derived from the enumeration method based on NS-SA. Numerical experiments are conducted to analyze the impact of patients’ arrival to the allocation of nurses and the ratio of patients’ waiting time and nurses’ idle time on the number of nurses needed. The research results can facilitate hospital managers to make decisions on human resources in practice.

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How to cite this article
Huabo Zhu, Jiafu Tang and Jun Gong , 2013. Nurses Staffing and Allocation in Multi-stage Queueing Network with I2 Patients’ Routing for Outpatient Department. Journal of Applied Sciences, 13: 2884-2890.

Keywords: queuing network, nurse allocation and SA

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