MANAGEMENT OF EMERGENCY DEPARTMENTS USING COMPLEX SYSTEMS MODELLING.

Managing Emergency Department (ED) in the light of unpredictable patient demand, limited resources and the need to meet national targets is a major challenge. Launched by the UK's Department of Health since 2000, the National Health Service (NHS) is now facing a 4-hour maximum time target to meet, where failures will trigger considerable financial penalties. However, the target is often missed especially with an increasing demand year on year, and it's widely accepted that process management is one of the key reasons. In this work, a state-of-the-art approach using Agent-based Modelling (ABM) is introduced to provide a decision support system for the ED to obtain information ahead of time in order to optimise the management of human and material resources. By modelling each patient, member of staff and other related resources as agents, this model has the nature of flexibility and capability of providing any detail. With the benefit of modularised design, this platform can also be easily customised for any ED. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]