Estimating Bed Requirements for a Pediatric Department in a University Hospital in Egypt

Abstract

Every day, a considerable number of children in need for health monitoring and control are turned away because of lack of beds in the Pediatric department in Zagazig University hospital in Egypt. This paper estimates the required number of beds needed for controlling this number of turned away children. The paper also investigates the effect of redistributing beds among different specialties on the service level. An Erlang Loss model is applied for estimating required capacity, then an optimization model is used for finding the optimum bed distribution that minimize number of turned away children.