Improving hospital bed utilisation through simulation and optimisation in South African Public Hospitals

Abstract

South African public hospitals have a shortage of beds and struggle to allocate patients to beds and keep track thereof. This causes inefficient utilisation of limited bed capacity. This report addresses this problem by first testing individual bed allocation rules using an agent based simulation to establish what the influence of individual allocation rules are on the system. The results of the rule based models are then used to create three rule sets that are tested using agent based simulation modelling. The results are compared to the current system used within Mamelodi Hospital. All rule sets perform better than the current system. By simply tracking the available beds an additional 20% capacity utilisation is achieved.