For an exam room that just finished a procedure, when clicking maintenance required, is there a way to have the technician take in equipment (like a cleaning cart) into the room with him and then return the equipment at the end of maintenance?
OK Ryan, here's a sample model showing how to model room cleaning using a "Move Equipment > Process" activity. I learned some things myself with this model.
For instance, I learned that if a patient is in the room when the cleaning activity starts, the staff will try to place the equipment next to the patient's current location at the time they arrive at the location with the equipment. To avoid this problem in the model, I don't start the cleaning activity until the patient is moved to the patient's next location in the track. This then forced me to use an explicit location for the Staff Destination of the cleaning activity because the patient is no longer in the room that needs to be cleaned. I did this using the getdestination() command. In cases where the patient exits the model rather than travels to a new location in the model, this approach won't work, but that doesn't appear to be your situation.
I also realized that I needed to reserve the room when the patient leaves so that a new patient won't be sent to it while it is being cleaned. This required me to unreserve the room in the Activity Finished Trigger of the cleaning activity.
Hopefully this solution works for you. If not, send me your model and I'll see what approach will work for your model.
Thank you! I think that will work. My FlexSim isn't letting me run those commands, but I think it is because I am using 5.1.0. I will upgrade to the newest version and try again. With the getdestination command, should the number after the comma be the same as the processing time?
Yes, the getdestination command is new to version 5.3 as well as the model I sent you was created in that version, so please install the new version.
Here is the description for the command:
Parameters (obj traveler, [num transferactivityID]) Description Gets the current, most recent, or pending destination of the traveler object. If the traveler is a patient, you should specify the activity ID number of the patient's transfer activity that you'd like to know the associated destination of. If the traveler is a patient and no transfer activity ID is specified, then the command will use the ID of the most recent activity started on the patient. If the traveler is a resource, rather than a patient, then the command assumes that the resource currently has an active task sequence containing a travel task, and it will use the most recent travel task (or if none have occured yet, the next pending travel task) to determine the destination.
No there isn't an option to use equipment with the maintenance feature on location objects. In order to use equipment, you will need to define the cleaning operation as an activity of the patient's track using the "Move Equipment > Process" activity type. It's important that the cleaning activity get kicked off prior to the patient entering the model exit location. This is easy enough to do by giving the cleaning operation the same predecessor as the patient exit activity.
When the patient leaves the room, how do you ensure that the cleaning activity starts in the room that was just vacated?
At the same time you kick off the activity for the patient to leave the model, you will be kicking off the activity to clean the room; therfore, the patient will still be in the bed momentarily when the cleaning activity is started, so you will be able to use the default "PATIENT_LOCATION" for the Staff Destination of the cleaning activity.
I think I have all of the above happening, but after the staff with the cleaning cart enters the operating room the patient just left from, they then travel with the cleaning cart to the next room the patient travels to, leave the cart unattended there, and travel back to the operating room they were cleaning.
Hmmm... not sure why that would be happening. I've always used a regular Process activity to model the cleaning activity and haven't seen the problem. Maybe with the use of the Move Equipment > Process activity, the Staff Destination field is being evaluated at a point in time when the patient has left the room already and therefore "PATIENT_LOCATION" isn't going to work. You may need to explicitly state the room location. I'll build myself a little sample model and explore what's going on...
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