UTILITY ANALYSIS OF AN INTENSIVE CARE UNIT MEDICAL SERVICE MODEL USING QUEUING THEORY WITH IMPROVED TAGUCHI LOSS FUNCTION

Abstract

A common situation that occurs in everyday life is that of queuing or waiting in the line for services. Long queues have become a major source of concern in all service facilities and the most affected are the Intensive Care Units in medical facilities. This study is therefore a utility analysis of queuing problem at Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital (MTRH) Intensive Care Unit (ICU) in Kenya. The objectives were to determine the average time of a patient in the system, optimum number of beds required and establish the stability of the system using time and costs of the system. Admission data of ICU for six months was obtained from MTRH. Due to the nature of the problem, a Multi-server queuing Model (M/M/s) was used together with Improved Taguchi Loss Function to analyze the problem and an excel calculator was used to simulate the model results in five scenarios. It was found that the optimum number of beds required in the ICU was 13, which reduces the patient waiting time by 86.06% while server utilization remains good at 77%. Lastly, the stability of the system was found out to be achieved when the bed allocation is between 12 and 14 by using the total expected costs together with improved Taguchi Loss Function. Therefore, from the findings of this work, it is recommended that MTRH management, policy makers at county and national level and other health facilities with similar queuing problem improve the overall patient care by installing the optimum number of beds in order to meet the patient needs. The significance of the study is to provide sufficient information to the health service providers, county governments and national governments improve service delivery to reduce customer mortality rate.