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Melbourne Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) is building a new hospital, and needs to migrate between 150 to 200 young patients from the old 8-floor building to the new one, with wards on 6 floors. The hospital management determined that they had an 8-10 hour window for the patient migration, and decided to simulate the patient migration to determine the level of staffing, routing and scheduling required to meet this target.
RCH considered using Flexsim after reading a case study by Denver Children’s Hospital, which had used the software in 2007 for the same task.
The complex model had over 400 bed positions, 6 CAD drawings, over 1000 network points, and 21 elevators ( in 6 individually controllable banks). Data tables controlled staff and patient numbers, and the migration routing and schedule.
The model used user-controllable parameters that allowed hospital staff to play with the options until they had confidence that they knew what to do. The Experimenter function helped, by comparing various scenarios, to determine the required number of migration teams.
UPDATE: The migration of kids to the new hospital took place on Wednesday 30th November 2011. The Hospital was able to move 143 kids in just under 8 hours, which was right on target. RCH have said the move was a huge success!
See the story on the RCH Website:http://www.rch.org.au/blogs/inthenews/2011/11/30/all-patients-have-moved/