Estimating the Right Allocation of Doctors in Emergency Department

Emergency Department (ED) provides acute care to various medical and surgical conditions. In a typical ED, there are three management zones: Red, Yellow and Green zones for attending patients with critical, semi critical and non-critical illness and injuries, respectively. The problem is staffing each zone with adequate doctors (the scarce resource) to ensure the ED is able to function as a reliable organisation. Consequently, this paper presents a useful way to estimate the right allocation of doctors in ED through Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) implemented using Arena. The estimation is based on patients' waiting time and doctors' utilisation rate. The basis of the simulation is drawn from Queuing Theory and Theory of Constraints. The case study is the University Malaya Medical Centre (UMMC). Seven scenarios based on real-life situations are simulated and analysed. The results show that the right allocation to the Red, Yellow, and Green Zones in UMMC-ED are two, four and two doctors, respectively. The findings will serve as the basis to plan for future work on repositioning relatively free doctors from one zone to another zone that is facing temporary overcrowding emergencies.