Improving the Mean Waiting Time of Patients by by Simulation in a Health Service Provision Clinic

In this paper, a reception model is proposed to improve waiting time of patients considering utilization of doctors and nurses in a neurology clinic by discrete-event simulation (DES). A neurology clinic including 8 doctors with different specialties is investigated. First, an interview and observation was done and then, required data relating patients' traffic were recorded and used for simulation. To analyze case study, first, bottlenecks were identified. It was observed that mean waiting time (MWT) of patients in total reception was high. For improving MWF, some scenarios were defined. Among all scenarios, increasing the number of nurses in the reception unit was the most effective one. The results of DES shows that by increasing the number of nurses to 4 individuals, the MWT can be decreased 8.345 minutes per day for each patient. Also, the utilization of doctors can be increased considerably. For validation, the results of the simulation were compared with real data by statistical analysis. These analysis approved the DES results.