A Simulation Model to Evaluate the Patient Flow in an Intensive Care Unit Under Different Levels of Specialization

Intensive care units are important departments in hospitals that are complicated in that they have both urgent and elective patients with a variety of specialty needs. Their design involves important operations strategy decisions, such as whether there are several specialized units for certain patient needs or general facilities, or something in between. They also involve bed capacity decisions for the aggregate and potentially specialized units. This paper presents a simulation model which is used to assess trade-offs in these operational design issues with respect to three performance measures (rejection rate, rescheduling rate, and bed occupancy rate), using data and design options for Amsterdam UMC, location AMC (AMC).