Shouldice Hospital Case Study

Part 1:

Question 1:

1. The flow unit chosen was patients, because the patients are the “units” that are undergoing the process.  Another way to describe this situation is that the patients are receiving a service, and thus in a service business the customers are the flow units.

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4

No resources were used.

[pic 1]

*A more detailed version of the Flowchart can be found in the Appendix

Question 2:

b)

The overall capacity rate of Shouldice Hospital depends on the capacity rate of the bottleneck activity, which was identified to be the beds.  The beds were the resource with the highest flow time and lowest capacity rate.  

Calculations:

Capacity rate:

1. Surgeons: 12 x 5 x 4 = 240

(# of surgeons) x (number of days a week they operate) x (number of patients they can operate on per day) = 200

2. Operating Rooms: 5 x 8 x 5 = 200

(Number of operating rooms) x (Hours capable of operations) x (Days of operation) = 200

3. Beds: 7 x 30 = 210

(# of days per week) x (# patients coming in) = 210

Question 3:

a)

Calculations:

Capacity rate:
1. Surgeons: 12 x 6 x 4 = 288

(# of surgeons) x (number of days a week they operate) x (number of patients they can operate on per day) = 288

2. Operating Rooms: 6 x 8 x 5 = 240

(Number of operating rooms) x (Hours capable of operations) x (Days of operation) = 240

3. Beds: 7 x 30 = 210

(# of days per week) x (# patients coming in) = 210

b)    

Question 4:

From Little’s Law, T = I/R, I now is 90*120%= 108 patients/3 days. T is still 3 days for every patients so R need to be increased. R =I /T = 108/3 = 36 patients/ days. Shouldice increases the amount of patients that they commit per day by 6.(which is an 20% in the input rate).  The maximum amount of patients that surgeons can operate on is 12*4 = 48 patients/day. The capacity rate for the operating rooms are 5 rooms * 8 patients/day = 40 patients. However, because there are only 5 operating rooms, there can only be 5 operations going on at one time, which limits the amount of surgeons who can perform in one hour. The hospital should increase the amount of operating rooms by one to increase the amount of surgeons that can work per hour, thus increasing the total output rate. Now the capacity rate for the operating room is 6 patients/ hr * 8 hr= 48 patients. Which is the same to the capacity rate of surgeons.  This would help increase the utilization rate of surgeons, as well as operating rooms, as demonstrated in the table below.  Also we need to increase the beds by 18 to cope with the input rate of the patients now. The total beds now would be 108.

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