Analysis of waiting times with queue model and labor planning: An application for a dentistry hospital

There are a lot of establishments serve people in many ways. Incrising of population of humans and having not enough resources cause many problems and one of them is that people may have to wait too much in queue. It affects many establisments but health care providers are struggling more than any institutes. Even one tiny bit of delay could be fatal for some patients in some units of health care establisments. These troubles which occur in hospitals should be removed. There are not many patients with vital conditions in dental hospitals (except for exceptions) however, due to the intensity of the patients coming and the queues formed, there are disruptions in the operation of the examination process. This research was made on the patients who medically examined before treatment in Akdeniz University Collage of Dentistry's sections which are mouth, chin and tooth. There has been made some changes in the planning of usage of hospital resources. Thus, the average waiting times of the patients and the average number of people waiting in the queue were aimed to be reduced. In this respect, the data of the processes that patients have during medical examination was obtained by observation; in the cases where observation could not able to done, it was obtained by interviewing with the health personnel and the documents picked up from data processing section of the collage. A simulation model was established by using ARENA package program, because known queue models and solutions are insufficient. The results obtained with the model were evaluated and it was determined that the point where patients wait most is the examination clinic. The resources of bottleneck process were redesigned and alternative scenarios were derived. Firstly alternative scenarios were compared to each other, then compared to the current situation. It was seen that there was an improvement in the average waiting time of patients and the average number of the patients who waiting in the queue. Key Words: Queue models, planning of resources, simulation, queue modeling in dental hospital