CHAPTER 14
QUEUING MODELS AND CAPACITY PLANNING
LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
• Describe the queuing systems and their use in health care services.
• Recognize queuing concepts and their relationship to capacity planning.
• Describe various queuing model formulations that lend themselves to health care problems.
• Analyze the measures of performance in evaluation of queuing systems.
• Develop a model and solve a queuing problem in health services.
Queuing theory is a mathematical approach to the analysis of waiting lines. Waiting lines in health care organizations can be found wherever either patients or customers arrive randomly for services, such as walk-in patients and emergency room arrivals, or phone calls from physician offices to health maintenance ...