Increasing utilization

BUPA is one of the world’s leading private health care organizations. In the last 3/ 4 years with developments in medical care, such as noninvasive surgery, there has been a move to ambulatory care health care and diagnostic facilities. These "ACAD" units are designed so that patients can walk in to the hospital in the morning for immediate treatment, rest for a period (usually no longer than 12 hours) and be discharged before the end of the day.

The Challenge
BUPA Parkway Hospital needed to address some key issues to move ahead of the times:

• How to allow more patients to be admitted to the hospital
• How to achieve better utilization of key resources (X ray and ultrasound were major bottlenecks)
• Increase throughput of the hospital

The Solution
From process maps supplied by hospital staff a model was built and revised on an ongoing basis. It used information relating to:

• Patient arrival rates
• Types of procedure demanded
• Proportion of patients admitted to each clinical procedure

The Result
The model showed that the key resources were indeed bottlenecked and that a surprising number of day-case patients were using (expensive) inpatient beds. The study recommended the implementation of one additional X ray machine and the reconfiguration of the hospital to accommodate a larger number of day care beds. The findings of the project have been welcomed by the client:

"…quite apart from the results, which will certainly support my case to improve facilities here, it has clarified thinking at all levels of management about the way we conduct our business."

Ian Whitehouse, BUPA Parkway Hospital