Analysis of congestion in a university outpatient centre

The application of queueing theory to alleviate a serious congestion problem in a University Outpatient Clinic is described in this paper. The primary objective of the application was to determine, using minimization of cost (both waiting and service) as the measure of performance, the optimal number of servers that should be at the patient-personnel encounter points which had major bottlenecks. The recommendations were implemented, resulting in a substantial reduction of waiting time for patients.