Queuing analysis of patient flow in Rwandan hospitals: Case study "Rwanda Military Hospital

Abstract

The increasing population and health-need due to adverse environmental conditions have led to escalating waiting times and congestion in hospitals, especially in the Emergency and Accident Departments. It is universally acknowledged that a hospital should treat its patients, especially those in need of critical care promptly. Queueing theory is a mathematical approach in Operations Research applied to the analysis of waiting lines. Rwanda Military Hospital is one of many hospitals that are presenting long waiting times for patients looking for services in all departments. This research project focuses on both analytical techniques and simulations to design an algorithm based on queuing theory of multi servers queuing network model of outpatient flow that will improve the healthcare services in the department using MATLAB/Simulink tool to model and simulate the current and designed models. Finally, the research project will compare the results to see the improvement and the performance of the designed model. The research thesis examined first, the waiting time of patients in the emergency and accident department by using queuing model after calculating the mean number of arrivals per hour and the mean number of patients served per hour. Further results from data collected for all four blocks were analysed to know the factors that cause long waiting for queues in the department. The results showed that the system traffic intensity is greater than one. This means that the queue grew endlessly. There were a big number of patients waiting in the queue and they waited for a long time before being serviced.