Solved: Nurse Responsible for Multiple Patients

shaun_d2 · ‎09-22-2020

[ FlexSim 20.2.2 ]

I am trying to model a clinic in which there are ~20 rooms which are monitored by ~10 nurses. In these rooms, patients are receiving chemotherapy, meaning they only require set-up by the nurse, and then check-in's every 25% of the processing time of chemo.

I want to release the nurse after they "set-up" their first patient, allowing them to retrieve another patient from the waiting room and set them up, however this makes them look 'idle' in the state dashboard if there is no patient waiting. In reality, if the nurse has a patient receiving chemo, that nurse is occupied.

Is there any possible way of setting up the process flow in this manner?

Thank you

cliff_king · ‎09-22-2020

Therefore, is the nurse only considered "Idle" when all the patients they have helped have left the model?

shaun_d2 · ‎09-23-2020

Hi Cliff - Yes, for the sake of this example, that would be a fair assessment.

tee_hiett · ‎09-23-2020

@shaun.d2 Don't the nurses have to go back At regular intervals to check on the patient after setup?

shaun_d2 · ‎09-23-2020

Yes, exactly. Aligning with what Cliff asked, the only time a nurse would be "idle" is after their final patient for the day has exited the system. Otherwise, they will always be escorting a patient, prepping a patient, or observing a patient on some interval.

cliff_king · ‎09-23-2020

I'm sure there is some way to address this scenario, but I don't see a solution that uses the standard methods. The standard way to "utilize" staff is with a Process activity block that set's the staff's state to busy and/or use an Acquire Resource activity to acquire the staff member. Utilization charts can show both states and/or acquisition status. The problem you have is that if you rely on the Process activity to set the state of the nurse to busy for the entire stay of the patient, then it would require you to preempt this process to use the nurse to setup another patient. By the same token, the Acquire Resource activities would require you to Release the nurse before you could acquire the nurse for the new patient.

So in light of how things naturally work, you would either need to come up with your own custom way of reporting on the utilization of a nurse as you've defined it, or you would need to come up with a unique way of modeling the tasks of the nurse. Have you begun your model? If so, I'd like you to post it and see if I can help you with a solution. I'm also curious how you are modeling the nurse assignments. Are the nurses assigned to specific beds and then patients are assigned evenly to the different nurse zones? I'm wondering how it works in the actual clinic.

shaun_d2 · ‎09-24-2020

Hi Cliff, appreciate the thorough response. I'm in the beginning stages of modeling, which currently has my nurses as 'idle' once setting up the patient. My initial thought was to create an independent task called 'rounds/observing' or similar, which I could have my nurses perform once the patient began chemo. There isn't a huge amount of value associated with measuring how much time each nurse monitors each patient, etc. so a catch-all activity that they could perform seemed like it might be applicable.

In regards to your last point (specifc nurse beds, etc.), you are exactly right. There are three nursing stations in chemotherapy, each of which has 2-3 nurses. These nurses will always retrieve the patients from the waiting room and return to a bed which is adjacent to their 'home' work station. I have not begun that portion of the model yet, but would appreciate your input on best-practice for that.

I'm not currently at a point where I think posting the model is ideal, I plan to work on it for a few more days, at that point I will mark the question as private and bump the thread - would love to have your input.

Thanks again!

cliff_king · ‎09-24-2020

One thought for keeping the nurse as busy as possible during the monitoring phase of a patients stay, but still allow opportunities for the nurse to go get another patient would be to use a repeating loop of monitoring tasks (process time activity) that occur every 5 minutes for 1 minute long or something like that.

ben_wilson5K2EV · ‎09-30-2020

Hi @shaun.d2, was cliff.king's answer helpful? If so, please click the red "Accept" button on their answer. Or if you still have questions, add a comment and we'll continue the conversation.

If we haven't heard back from you within 3 business days we'll auto-accept an answer, but you can always unaccept and comment back to reopen your question.

Nurse Responsible for Multiple Patients

Nurse Responsible for Multiple Patients

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