Problem: Shouldice Hospital Case
The purpose of our analysis is to determine the capacity, throughput, and resource utilization of the current and the future Shouldice Hospital. Make the following assumptions about current operations at Shouldice:
- There are no weekend (Saturday and Sunday) operations.
- The hospital admits 30 patients per day on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
- Each patient spends three full days in the hospital, and the surgery takes on the second day.
- Each surgeon can operate on four patients per day, and there are 12 surgeons who work at Shouldice hospital.
- Each operation takes one hour in the operating room, and each of the five operating rooms can be used from 7:30 am till 3:30 pm.
- The Shouldice Hospital has 90 beds, and is committed to a three-day process.
- All the other resources have sufficient capacity.
Consider the following questions.
Question: What is the capacity rate (per week) of the hospital? What is the weekly throughput rate of the hospital? What is the average bed utilization? How many patients will be in the hospital during each day of the week? Draw a discrete inventory build-up diagram with days of the week plotted on the x-axis and number of patients plotted on the y-axis.