Abstract
This paper examines whether urgent and regular patients waiting for a consultation at a radiotherapy outpatient department should be pooled or not. Both queuing theory and discrete event simulation were applied to a realistic case study. The theoretical approach shows that pooling is not always beneficial with regard to the waiting times of urgent patients. Furthermore, the practical approach indicates that the separation of queues may require less capacity to meet the waiting time performance target for urgent as well as regular patients. The results seem to be of general interest for hospitals.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Joustra, P., van der Sluis, E. & van Dijk, N.M. To pool or not to pool in hospitals: a theoretical and practical comparison for a radiotherapy outpatient department. Ann Oper Res 178, 77–89 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-009-0559-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-009-0559-7