An application of simulation to analyse resource sharing among health-care organisations

In the field of inventory management, it is a well-known fact that centralisation, by sharing the risk between several entities, helps reduce the inventory required to provide a certain level of service. In practice, centralisation can be difficult to accomplish, because improvements to the system's general performance may be achieved at the expense of some of the entities involved. This paper describes a simulation-based methodology used to study the impacts of equipment pooling on a group of local community service centres (CLSCs) in the Montreal (Canada) region. In addition to quantifying the benefits of the pooling process, the approach allowed the stakeholders to reach an agreement by appraising various pooling scenarios and identifying the conditions that would help ensure fairness.