Bed management in a Critical Care Unit

One of the main problems facing hospital managers is in coping with the variability in demand for the services that the hospital provides. This is particularly the case in the Critical Care Unit (CCU), where inability to provide adequate facilities on demand can lead to serious consequences. Admissions to CCUs may be categorized under two headings: unplanned (emergency) and planned (elective). The length of stay (LoS) in the CCU is heavily dependent on the admission category: unplanned admissions have a much longer LoS on average than elective patients. In this paper, we propose a mathematical model that shows how improvements in bed management may be achieved by distinguishing between these two categories of patients. The vast majority of previous literature in this field is concerned only with steady-state conditions, whereas in reality, activities in virtually all hospital environments are very much time dependent. This paper goes some way to addressing this problem.