Decision making support in reshaping hospital medical services

"Bed crisis" is a buzz word of the 90's in the National Health Services (NHS). Medical emergency admissions keep rising and hospital resources remain limited. Faced with such a dilemma, many hospitals have endeavoured to improve their service efficiencies in order to meet the challenge. This paper describes a real-life hospital process re-engineering project in which computer simulation and optimisation models were applied to provide decision making support in determining the size of the proposed medical assessment unit and the allocation of the available medical beds to minimise hospital bed overflows.