Emergency Department: a General Adaptable Simulation Model Implemented in Arena

The Emergency Department of a hospital is devoted to provide first aid to outpatients. A correct organization and resource dimensioning is very important both in the planning and in the management phase and may be usefully supported by a simulation model to be applied by administrators and operators. As an emergency department is a very complex framework, a model which simulates it requires a large amount of time and an expert software programmer to be built and implemented. In this paper a generalized flexible model has been built up, able to reproduce all common structural and functional characteristics of every actual emergency room. This simulation model can be easily adapted to almost all emergency departments only by defining its functional parameters without altering its structure; it is written in language SIMAN by tool Arena, widely diffused, and permits an easy readability also by non expert users.