Vasilakis C, El-Darzi E
University of Westminster, School of Computer Science, Northwick Park, Harrow, UK.
Health Care Manag Sci. 2001 Feb;4(1):31-6. doi: 10.1023/a:1009649615548.
The winter bed crisis is a cyclical phenomenon which appears in British hospitals every year, two or three weeks after Christmas. The crisis is usually attributed to factors such as the bad weather, influenza, older people, geriatricians, lack of cash or nurse shortages. However, a possible alternative explanation could be that beds within the hospital are blocked because of lack of social services for discharge of hospital patients during the Christmas period. Adopting this explanation of why the bed crisis occurs, the problem was considered as a queuing system and discrete event simulation was employed to evaluate the model numerically. The model shows that stopping discharges of rehabilitating patients for 21 days accompanied by a cessation of planned patients for 14 days precipitate a bed crisis when the planned admissions recommence. The extensive "what-if" capabilities of such models could be proved to be crucial to the designing and implementation of possible solutions to the problem.
冬季床位危机是一种周期性现象，每年圣诞节过后两到三周在英国医院出现。这场危机通常归因于恶劣天气、流感、老年人、老年病科医生、资金短缺或护士短缺等因素。然而，另一种可能的解释是，由于圣诞节期间缺乏社会服务来帮助医院患者出院，医院内的床位被占用。采用这种对床位危机发生原因的解释，该问题被视为一个排队系统，并采用离散事件模拟对模型进行数值评估。该模型表明，让康复患者停止出院21天，同时让计划内患者停止入院14天，当计划内入院恢复时会引发床位危机。事实证明，此类模型广泛的“假设分析”能力对于设计和实施该问题的可能解决方案至关重要。
