A planning model for requirement of emergency beds.

In-patient bed requirement (or number of beds required to cope with the workload) is of prime importance for hospital management because of its direct implication for manpower requirement and therefore the costs. In-patient beds could be divided into emergency beds and elective beds, where the requirement for emergency beds will be affected by both patient length of stay distributions and the random patterns in which patients arrive. In this paper, the author extends the early results by Pike et al. (1963, Br. J. Prev. Soc. Med. 17, 172) so that day-of-week effect is introduced into the queuing model to evaluate the requirement of emergency beds. It is demonstrated that emergency bed occupancy on any specific day of the week follows a Poisson distribution.