Bob Reilly remains pleased with your work to date. He now wants you to do some capacity analysis for Lee Jordan, Director of Medical/Nursing. Lee is concerned about bed capacity in the maternity ward. Lee wants some quick analysis done prior to exploring options for expansion. You are to meet with her for additional details. "Hello! Good to see you, how are you?" Lee greets you. "The patient load on our maternity ward seems to be increasing significantly. Since capacity expansion proposals take some time to go through the approval process and for the construction of the addition to the facility, I believe that we should do a thorough capacity analysis now and make sure that we have adequate capacity to handle the future demand." "In a medical service facility like ours we can not make exact demand predictions. So determining the number of beds needed in the maternity ward is a complex decision. When doing your analysis, you should know that the maternity ward currently has 80 beds. Our forecasted demand for next year is about 9125 patients. The number of days a bed is occupied by a patient varies. The average stay per patient is 3 days. Since actual demand at times may be higher than the average, we must have some safety capacity or a capacity cushion. I like having about 15% safety capacity so that we will not be in a crunch if demand is higher than average. This is all the data I have now. I want you to carefully examine the capacity issue and give me your recommendations. Specific questions are provided for you."
Layout Design at Valley Memorial Hospital
Describe the main criteria that you will use to evaluate alternate layout designs.
Calculate the load-distance score of the preliminary layout.
Calculate the load-distance score of the alternate layout, which incorporates Carol’s suggestions.
Looking at the data, suggest another way to locate the departments which would result in a better load-distance score.
If some of the medical professionals express a concern about basing the layout design solely on the traffic intensity between departments, how can you modify your analysis to allay their concerns?