The BedGame: a classroom game based on real healthcare challenges

The BedGame is a classroom game to introduce Operations Management (OM) in healthcare, more specifically to introduce the effects of centralized versus decentralized planning, and the concepts of variability and queueing theory. In the BedGame, players assign medical and surgical specialties to nursing wards to obtain a balanced bed distribution, while fulfilling as many of the specialty-specific requirements as possible. The game was first designed to support decision making in a hospital in The Netherlands, and afterwards converted to a classroom game. The game has been successfully used in several courses at the University of Twente including “Operations Management in Health Care” (undergraduate), “Quantitative Methods for Operations Management in Health Care” (graduate), and a course on patient logistics for healthcare professionals.