The Effects of a Boarding Area on Patient Waiting Time in the Emergency Department Using a Discrete-Event Simulation

Y Growing patient volume combined with limited capacities in emergency departments represents a challenge for hospital management to maintain a high quality of work without an increase in waiting times. Often patients cannot be directly admitted to the hospital after treatment in an emergency department due to limited bed capacities at the intensive care units or regular ward stations. Various approaches to solving this problem were proposed in recent years including ideas for active bed management within the emergency department or different allocation rules for specific boarding areas. This study develops a discrete-event simulation approach to simulate the patient flow of an emergency department based on real data. Furthermore, the set up of different patient boarding area systems are compared to other mechanisms such as adding more treatment beds to evaluate the effects on patients length of stay and waiting times in a scenario analysis.