THE APPLICATION OF QUEUEING THEORY FOR MODELING HUMAN RESOURCES IN AMBULANCE SERVICE

Nowadays, most of developed countries are facing an extreme challenge to establish efficient and effective health system despite of globalization and continuous changes in economic, political and social environment all over the world. Therefore, a systematic analysis and evaluation for effective resource allocation in a system is essential to provide competitive advantages for future survival and actions for the goal achievement. In the last decades, special focus has been given to practical implementation of operations research techniques in health care sector, in order to improve overall organization and quality. It seems that application of quantitative models in practice is widely used in developed countries and unfortunately in our local context awareness and usage of operation research models in health care systems is extremely rare. The main goal of this paper is to present how application of queueing models can aid decision making in health care sector, especially addressing workforce allocation. Based on the Erlang B model, simple staffing methods will be applied in order to obtain optimal number of ambulance crews in ambulance stations in Serbia.