Staffing a centralized appointment scheduling department in Lourdes Hospital

Lourdes Hospital uses a centralized system to schedule appointments by phone for outpatients, inpatients, and other ambulatory services requested by physicians, their staff, hospital personnel, and patients. Customer surveys and an increase in customer complaints revealed lengthy delays in answering telephone calls. The authors used a queuing model to find the optimal staffing levels to handle the variation in call arrivals within a day. The problem was solved by just rearranging the work shifts, without adding any staff. The authors also provide an easy-to-reference generalized queuing table to aid others in deciding staffing levels where M/M/c approximation is appropriate.