Scheduling model for non-critical patients admission into a hospital emergency department

The saturation of the Emergency Department services is mostly due to admission of non-urgent or minor-urgency patients who represent a high percentage of admitted patients in the service. We propose a model for scheduling the entry of these non-critical patients into the Emergency Department which may be helpful for the management of the service dealing with the current growing demand for emergency medical care. We hypothesize that a relocation of these non-critical patients in the expected input pattern, initially provided by actual historical data from the hospital, can lead to an improvement in waiting times for all patients, and therefore, to an improvement in the quality of service from the point of view of the service users, as it could avoid long waiting times in the service. Simulation is used to show and evaluate the effect of applying the proposed scheduling model.