Hospital Bed Allocation using Three-Stage Weighted Optimization Method for Government Hospital in Pulau Pinang

Abstract

Ineffective bed allocation across hospital departments leads to the imbalance between patients’ needs and resource capacity. This study aims to simulate patients’ arrivals, to measure the departments’ importance and to design a mathematical model for allocating beds which will be realized by the proposed three-stage weighted optimization model. The stages consist of data simulation in ARENA software, weight evaluation based on bed occupancy rate patients’ arrival rates, bed occupancy rate (BOR), patients’ average length of stay (ALOS) and bed operation cost (BOC), and weighted optimization using goal programming (GP) model. The goals to be achieved in this study consists of minimizing the idle beds in departments and the hospital and minimizing the total BOC. The result of the study shows that obstetrics and orthopaedics wards obtained the biggest number of beds while dengue and paediatrics surgery wards obtained the least number. The statistical analysis made to the results shows that patients’ arrival rate is the most influential factor in allocating the beds as its Pearson correlation value to the bed numbers is 0.789, which indicates strong correlation.