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In order to provide access to care in a timely manner, it is necessary to effectively manage the allocation of limited resources. such as beds. Bed management is a key to the effective delivery of high quality and low-cost healthcare. The purpose of this paper is to develop a discrete event simulation to assist in planning and staff scheduling decisions.

A discrete event simulation model was developed for a hospital system to analyze admissions, patient transfer, length of stay (LOS), waiting time and queue time. The hospital system contained 50 beds and four departments. The data used to construct the model were from five years of patient records and contained information on 23,019 patients. Each department’s performance measures were taken into consideration separately to understand and quantify the behavior of departments individually, and the hospital system as a whole. Several scenarios were analyzed to determine the impact on reducing the number of patients waiting in queue, waiting time and LOS of patients.

Using the simulation model, it was determined that reducing the bed turnover time by 1 h resulted in a statistically significant reduction in patient wait time in queue. Further, reducing the average LOS by 10 h results in statistically significant reductions in the average patient wait time and average patient queue. A comparative analysis of department also showed considerable improvements in average wait time, average number of patients in queue and average LOS with the addition of two beds.

This research highlights the applicability of simulation in healthcare. Through data that are often readily available in bed management tracking systems, the operational behavior of a hospital can be modeled, which enables hospital management to test the impact of changes without cost and risk.

Telephone response system is the frontline of hospital operations. The purpose of this paper is to analyze a representative telephone response system of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals, address the existing inefficiency issues such as long call waiting time, and improve system resilience to changes.

Resource sharing schemes are proposed to improve the system performance in answering calls related to appointment booking and medication renewal. Discrete event simulation is adopted to model the current system and the resource sharing schemes.

The resource sharing schemes dramatically improve system performance reflected by the decrease of call waiting time and queue, as well as the extreme high utilization of agents in a key unit. Compared with the less desired alternative of hiring additional employees to mitigate the performance issues, the resource sharing schemes perform at par or even better. Sharing more resource during the peak hours can further balance the agent workload.

The resource sharing schemes could alleviate staffing shortage, long waiting time, and high-abandonment rate in the bottle-beck unit of the system, and lead to better utilization of scarce resources on the hospital floor. The concept reflects localized centralization efforts in traditionally highly decentralized telephone operations in hospital systems.

This research provides a structured approach to analyze the operations of a VA telephone response system. The developed simulation model is validated, and this provides a valuable tool for management to analyze the complicated telephone operations of the telephone systems of other VA and non-VA hospitals. Resource sharing constitutes a cost-effective solution for improving system performance and resilience.

MacDermid Europe announces the appointment of Terence Copeland as new group managing diretor in charge of European operations. Mr Copeland, formerly manager of MacDermid Singapore and marketing director of MacDermid Asia, took up the post from the 1st of June.

The gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW) process is a widely used process that produces quality weldments. But the high heat generation from the GTAW arc can cause extreme temperatures as high as 20,000°C. The residual stresses and deformations are high accordingly. One of the methods for decreasing residual stresses and deformations is to change the welding pattern. In the literature, there are not so many examples of modeling dealing with welding patterns. This paper aims to investigate the influence of welding patterns on the deformations.

In this work, back-stepping patterns and partitioning of the weld line were investigated and the distortions and residual stresses were calculated. By doing this, temperature-dependent thermophysical and thermo-mechanical material properties were used. The temperature distribution and deformation from experiments with the same welding conditions were used for validation purposes.

Seven different welding patterns were analyzed. There is only one pattern with a single partition. There are three patterns investigated for both two and three partitioned weldings. The minimum deformation and the optimum residual stress combination is obtained for the last pattern, which is a three partitioned and diverging pattern.

The most important aspect of this paper is that it deals with welding patterns, which is not much studied beforehand. The other important thing is that the structural part and the thermal part of the simulation were coupled mutually and validated according to experiments.