Inpatient Transportation System Simulation for Porter Work Scheduling Analysis: A Case Study

Special service system to transport inpatients to a health treatment location has been implemented in several countries such as America and South Korea. The problem in transporting patient is an un-even distribution of the workload of porters between shifts and zones. This situation raises a challenge to determine the appropriate number of workers/porters in each shift to ensure an even distribution of workload. The simulation model is built and studied on Flexsim with several steps. Furthermore, several scenarios are carried out by paying attention to workload parameters, by also considering the waiting time experienced by inpatients before being picked up. Workload parameters are defined as the porter's utility and porter's travel distance. There is a correlation between porter's utility and porter's travel distance parameters in the inpatient transportation system. The appropriate scenario that could balance the workload is by allocating more porter in shifts and zones that have more transfer request. This solution balance porter's utility and travel distance and patient's wait time.