A STUDY OF IMPROVING HOSPITAL OUT PATIENT DEPARTMENT (OPD) USING QUEUING NETWORK ANALYSIS METHODOLOGY

Service time and waiting time in hospitals are of growing importance in quality healthcare delivery. Long waiting times for health care is a critical issue in many countries. Many of the countries have now introduced benchmarks for that. The objective of this research paper is to study the Out Patient Department (OPD) of a hospital using queuing network analysis. The study aims to analyze the patient flow system by measuring the length of stay, service and waiting time distribution of patients and waiting time between two consecutive services availed / treatment undergone / department visited were calculated in an Out Patient Department (OPD) of a multispecialty hospital. There are major differences in how waiting times are measured: waiting period for kind of care/ services the patient is waiting for; the parameters used; and where in the patient journey the measurement begins. We investigated the waiting time for patients before and during availing any of the services of multispecialty, rural based hospital in Gujarat, India. Various descriptive statistics analyses of routine data for 438 patients determined the association between selected patient characteristics, service time and waiting time. The median time spent by a patient (between patients enters in the hospital, being seen by a physician / availing various services and leaves the hospital is 44 minutes (within a range of 7.59 – 382 minutes). Day of arrival, time of arrival and service/ treatment category were significantly associated with waiting time. Variability in waiting times could be addressed by more standardized hospital operations, but may also be influenced by other clinical or non-clinical factors that require further investigation.