Beds Simulator 1.0: a software for the modelisation of the number of beds required for a hospital department.

The determination of the number of beds needed for a hospital department is a complex problem that try to take into account efficiency, forecasting of needs, appropriateness of stays. Health authority used methods based on ratios that do not take into account local specificities and use rather to support an economic decision. On the other side, the models developed are too specific to be applied to all type of hospital department. Moreover, all the solutions depend on the LoS (Length of Stay). We have developed a non parametric method to solve this problem. This modelisation was successfully tested in teaching and non teaching hospitals, for an Intensive Care Unit, two Internal Medicine and a surgical departments. A software easy to use was developed, working on Windows available on our website www.sante.univ-nantes.fr/med/stat/.