Design of a Multi-Priority Triage Chair for Crowded Remote Healthcare Centers in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Remote healthcare centers located in sub-Saharan of Africa are still facing a shortage of healthcare practitioners, yielding long queue of patients in waiting rooms during several hours. This situation increases the risk that critical patients are consulted too late, motivating the importance of priority-based patient scheduling systems. This paper presents the design of a Multi-Priority Triage Chair (MPTC) to be installed at the entrance of patient’s waiting rooms such that each new patient first sits in the MPTC to measure its vital signs and register his/her other priority parameters such as arrival time, travel time or distance between the concerned center and its home, and so on. The proposed MPTC will then update in real-time the consultation planning in order to statistically minimize (i) the number of critical patients not treated within a pre-defined waiting time, (ii) the number of patients waiting for more than a pre-defined period and (iii) the number of patients living relatively far who gets their consultation postponed to another day.