Simulating Patient Flows in a Cancer Clinic

Sammanfattning: Planning resources in cancer care is difficult due to system complexity, varying resource availability and uncertain demand. It has become so complex that the analysis of treatment processes in cancer clinics cannot be done analytically [12]. Therefore, in this thesis a model of a cancer clinic is developed using discrete event simulation. The goal of the thesis is develop the model so that it can be used as research tool to investigate bottlenecks, allocation of resources and system properties.The model will also serve as a base plate for further investigations. Most other studies on this subject have not in detail presented how the simulation handles the discrete effect of weekends and servers only being active during certain part of the day, which is addressed in thesis. In this thesis a sensitivity analysis is carried out for a number of different parameters. First we investigate the effect of increasing the load and analyse how schedule utilization and patient system time (PST) are affected. Secondly, the system sensitivity to disturbances such as sick doctors and patient rebooks are investigated. Furthermore, bottlenecks and schedule alignment is also investigated.