Application of Queuing Theory to Patient Satisfaction at Combined Hospital, Srinagar Garhwal Uttarakhand

In today's stressful life, taking care of your health has become very important, and because of it, now a days there is a very heavy burden of patients on the private clinics, hospitals and other organizations taking care of ill and injured people. In these organizations patients arrive, wait for service, obtain service, and then depart, which is a queuing system. As queuing theory is the mathematical approach to analyze the waiting lines in any setting where arrival rate of subjects is faster than the system can handle. It is applicable to healthcare settings also where the systems have excess capacity to accommodate random variations. The need for application of queuing theory in healthcare settings is very important because these organizations are dealing with the well-being and human life is concerned. The patient satisfaction, time they spent in the queue while waiting for their turn to meet doctor as well as time they spent with the doctor, is very important for the proper working of any hospital as well as for the image of the hospital before the public. In this paper, I studied about the patient satisfaction at Combined Hospital, Srinagar Garhwal Uttarakhand. The paper explained the patients' demographic characteristics, nature of their illness, time they spent before reaching the hospital, on the queue to see the doctor and with the doctor. The patients' views about the queuing and patient behavior on the queue were also measured. The suggestions from patients on how the time they spend on the queue can be shortened were also taken.