Service philosophies for hospital admission planning

The ‘traditional’ service philosophy underlying hospital admission planning has been one of optimising the use of scarce hospital resources without paying much attention to the level of service offered to patients. As patients nowadays do not accept long waiting times for hospital admission, it becomes necessary to consider alternative service philosophies. Waiting lists have also become a political issue, and a ternative service philosophies have been advocated, such as giving all patients an appointment for admission. A simulation model was built to examine the impacts of extreme service philosophies in a simplified hospital setting. The alternative philosophies considered are the ‘zero waiting time’ philosophy (immediate treatment) and the ‘booked admissions’ philosophy (using an appointmentfor admission). The results of these service philosophies are compared with the results of the current philosophy, i.e. the ‘maximising resource use’ philosophy. The implications of the different philosophies in terms of patient service and resource use are discussed and used to feed the debate on more balanced philosophies for admission planning.