Improved Patient Admission Planning - A Discrete Event Simulation Study at the Department of Pulmonary Medicine, Linköping University Hospital

Sammanfattning: The Swedish health care system plays a vital role in satisfying the citizens’ demands for quality health care services. To deliver the right services in time in a hospital, an efficient admission plan is required, but this can be difficult to achieve. The Department of Pulmonary Medicine at the University Hospital in Linköping needs a better admission plan for their patients. In the department, the patient demand does not match the capacity, which leads to overcrowding at the ward. The aim of this thesis is to improve the admission plan of patients for the ward at the Department of Pulmonary Medicine by using discrete event simulation. To fulfil the aim, a simulation study is performed to understand how the system is working, where the problems emerged and how to prevent overcrowding. Different experiments are performed to check what could improve the admission plan at the ward. The results from this study shows that an improvement of the admission plan could be reached by better cooperation between involved units, improved documentation at the Department, a queue system of patients based on medical priorities and changed number of care beds. These solutions can prevent overcrowding and deliver health care services in time.