Design and Performance Evaluation of Intensive Care Unit Systems

Abstract

Insufficient medical resources are always a serious problem in Hong Kong. It causes a lower quality of medical service and possibly affects the safety of the patients. Especially when it happens in Intensive Care Units (ICUs), which take care of the seriously ill patients in the hospital. According to the statistics in 2009, only less than four beds and one doctor are reserved for every 100 thousand citizens, which are way far from enough to satisfy the demand in Hong Kong, especially when a huge disease explodes. Patients are asked to reschedule or transfer to another ICU to complete their surgery and it raises the risk of the surgery. Therefore, it is important to find out a solution to allocate the resources efficiently. This project aims to discover a better solution, from the perspective of ICU's policy, by simulating and analysing. In this project, three types of policies will be compared and analysed, including basic policy, virtual ICU policy, and threshold policy, which the last two of it are based on the basic policy to modify. By changing the allocation of the resources, we can find the most suitable solution to reduce the blocking rate and optimize medical resources.