Background

Queuing has become an expected part of healthcare services, and the length of queues in NHS waiting rooms has received a lot of attention. Long patient queues can have an impact on patients receiving care as well as the healthcare staff providing it.

This project will explore the nature of the relationship between service times – influenced by queue length and how healthcare workers cope with them – and staff workload in order to assess and quantify workforce (server) behaviours.

Approach

This project will aim to enhance conventional mathematical models by informing them with ethnographic models, in order to incorporate a behavioural component in the system. Both analytical queuing and simulation models will be developed to consider switching thresholds to allow for multiple-speed service.