Article ID: | iaor20105030 |
Volume: | 178 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 77 |
End Page Number: | 89 |
Publication Date: | Jul 2010 |
Journal: | Annals of Operations Research |
Authors: | Dijk Nico M, Joustra Paul, Sluis Erik |
Keywords: | queues: applications |
This paper examines whether urgent and regular patients waiting for a consultation at a radiotherapy outpatient department should be pooled or not. Both queuing theory and discrete event simulation were applied to a realistic case study. The theoretical approach shows that pooling is not always beneficial with regard to the waiting times of urgent patients. Furthermore, the practical approach indicates that the separation of queues may require less capacity to meet the waiting time performance target for urgent as well as regular patients. The results seem to be of general interest for hospitals.