An analytical model based on simulation aiming to improve patient flow in a hospital surgical suite

Surgical suits allocate a large amount of expenses to hospitals; on the other hand, they constitute a huge part of hospital revenues. Patient flow optimization in a surgical suite by omitting or reducing bottlenecks which cause loss of time is one of the key solutions in minimizing the patients’ length of stay1 (LOS) in the system, lowering the expenses, increasing efficiency, and also enhancing patients’ satisfaction. In this paper, an analytical model based on simulation aiming at patient flow optimization in the surgical suite has been proposed. To achieve such a goal, first, modeling of patients' workflow was created by using discrete-event simulation. Afterward, improvement scenarios were applied in the simulated model of surgical suites. Among defined scenarios, the combination scenario consisting of the omission of the waiting time between the patients’ entrance to the surgical suite and beginning of the admission procedure, being on time for the first operation, and adding a resource to the resources of the transportation and recovery room, was chosen as the best scenario. The results of the simulation indicate that performing this scenario can decrease patients’ LOS in such a system to 22.15%.