(Amy Hailer, Chris Johnson, Christian Puryear, Adam Saucedo, 1996)
Baylor University Medical Center (BUMC) is a downtown-Dallas-based hospital with many satellite locations around the metroplex. In northeast Tarrant county, BUMS acquired a small hospital in Grapevine. The Grapevine Hospital is a licensed 104-bed facility offering both in- and out-patient services. The Emergency Department (ED) at Baylor Grapevine is a six-bed unit catering primarily to urgent patients rather than trauma patients. Currently, this department is undergoing major changes in staffing and physical size. A new facility is under construction and will be completed in September 1996.
The administrators of the Grapevine Hospital recognized a potential problem and requested a tool to accurately simulate the work done in the ED. The purpose of this project is two-fold: 1) to determine the impact of staffing and/or facility changes on the efficiency of the ED, and 2) to gain a better understanding of the patient flow through the ED in order to reduce the occurrence of bottlenecks in the new facility. Consistently, the ED sees its largest number of patients on the weekend. On average, the ED services 110 patients each weekend. Therefore, the model simulates the work done by the entire ED on a Saturday.