On the risk of premature transfer from coronary care units

Frank Wharton

Omega, 1996, vol. 24, issue 4, 413-423

Abstract: When a coronary care unit becomes full, an existing patient will be transferred out of intensive care and into a general medical or surgical ward in order to make room for the next arrival. The patient transferred may have suffered a heart attack and still be at risk whilst the next patient admitted may subsequently be diagnosed to have nothing more serious than indigestion. Queueing theory is used to develop a model which predicts the proportion of patients from each diagnostic or risk category that would be prematurely transferred as a function of the size of the unit, number of risk categories, mean arrival rates, and length of stay. A case study is used to demonstrate how the model parameters have been estimated and the operating characteristics determined for a particular unit.

Keywords: health; service; emergency; services; risk; queueing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1996
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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