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.
