Simulation Study of Dreyer Urgent Care Facility

The health service center is considering modification of the current doctor schedule to decrease the average time patients spend in the facility. A new schedule, which on average has an extra doctor added for each time slot, has been suggested by the preliminary queueing analysis. It is anticipated that the schedule will improve the system performance but has yet to be verified by a discrete event simulation model. The shifting bottleneck issue has to be considered as well. Increasing the resource capacity of the current bottleneck (believed to be the doctor resource) might trigger a new bottleneck and could possibly worsen the current situation. In this study, the current and proposed doctor schedules are tested on the simulation model created using SIMAN language and simulated on Arena. The output from the simulation just verifies the preliminary queueing analysis that the proposed schedule decreases the average time patients spend in the facility. Sensitivity analysis is performed as well, and the next bottleneck resource is identified.