Many patient visits to emergency departments result in the patient dying or being pronounced dead on arrival. The numbers of deaths in emergency departments are likely to increase as a significant portion of the U.S. population ages. Consequently, emergency nurses face many obstacles to providing quality end-of-life (EOL) care when death occurs. The purpose of this study was to identify suggest...

Genetic algorithms have during the recent years gained popularity also in the domain of chemical engineering, among other applications for scheduling purposes. A genetic algorithm builds new sequences by combining and mutating previous sequences of genes, i.e. chromosomes, into a new set of chromosomes. In this new set, only the fittest survive, and the procedure is repeated. As a schedule in c...

In this issue, Chan et al. report interesting perspectives on the notion of ‘busyness’ in emergency departments (EDs) [1]. Specifically, they found that faculty and junior residents differed significantly in their conception of busyness and that faculty development around teaching managerial skills is deficient. We feel that the authors have outlined both an issue that cuts to the heart of what...

With increasing demand for medical services, emergency departments (ED) are facing problems such as overcrowding and dissatisfaction. Improving the key performance indicators of EDs has been the focal point of healthcare management. This paper addresses performance analysis of ED of a general hospital. To this aim, a discrete event dynamic modeling approach is used to model the ED processes. Th...