Evaluation of response capacity to patient attention demand in an Emergency Department

The progressive growth of aging, increased life expectancy and a greater number of chronic diseases contribute significantly to the growing demand of emergency medical care, and thus, on saturation of Emergency Departments. This is one of the most important current problems in healthcare systems worldwide. This work proposes an analytical model to calculate the theoretical throughput of a particular sanitary staff configuration in a Hospital Emergency Department, which is, the number of patients it can attend per unit time given its composition. The analytical model validation is based on data generated by simulation of the real system, based on an agent based model of the system, which makes it possible to take into account different valid sanitary staff configurations and different number of patients entering the emergency service. In fact, we aim to evaluate the response capacity of an ED, specifically of doctors, nurses, admission and triage personnel, who make up a specific sanitary staff configuration, for any possible configuration, according to the patient flow throughout the service. It would not be possible to test the different possible situations in the real system and this is the main reason why we obtain the necessary information about the system performance for the validation of the model using a simulator as a sensor of the real system. The theoretical throughput is a measure of the response capacity to patient's attention in the system and, moreover, it will be a reference in order to make possible a model for planning the entry of non-critical patients into the service by its relocation in the current input pattern, which is an immediate future goal in our current research. This research offers the availability of relevant knowledge to the managers of the Emergency Departments to make decisions to improve the quality of the service in anticipation of the expected growing demand of the service in the very near future.