The Health Sciences Centre (HSC)

The operating room (OR) is one of the most demanding departments in Winnipeg Health Science Center (WHSC). The problems faced to the OR are the long waiting list of patients and the inefficient utilization of human resources and facilities. The OR needs to treat a large variety of patient types versatility and dynamically. A discrete event simulation tool is used for modeling the OR operation. The major work involving in this research includes data collection, simulation modeling, model validation and output analysis. The initial results have shown the simulation potential in the performance improvement of healthcare systems

The Health Sciences Centre (HSC) in Winnipeg is the major trauma centre serving the entire province of Manitoba, Northwestern Ontario, and Nunavut. Therefore, it has to handle a high volume of both elective and emergent surgical patients. Because the facility always strives to provide quality care in a fast and effective manner, it initiated a research project to analyze its surgical patient flow and generate ideas on how it could be redesigned to improve the systems performance. After a year of careful analysis, all of the problems identified were grouped into six major categories, showcasing how various departments are affected by each problem. Based on this analysis, the true impact of each problem in the surgical patient flow process can be understood. Steps can now be taken to identify which problems need to be addressed, what changes should be made, and how this will benefit the entire system.

The sludge treatment reed bed is a sustainable sewage sludge management technology that offers promising sludge dewatering and stabilisation, due to its low energy and labour requirements, and minimal operating and maintenance costs. Despite numerous existing studies and increasing applications of sludge treatment reed bed in both developed and developing countries, the lack of standard system configurations and operating regimes led to several operational problems, including bed clogging and poor dewatering and mineralisation efficiency. Sludge dewatering and stabilisation in STBRs are complex processes governed by system- and operation-related factors such as the substrate media, macrophytes, loading regime, sludge characteristics, and climate conditions. Rather than the complex experimental study, process-based modelling has become a promising approach to investigating the influence of specific factors on the efficiency of sludge dewatering and stabilisation. This paper presents an overview of the critical system and operating parameters in sludge treatment reed beds and a summary of the interactions between the factors. Then, a framework of process-based modelling is proposed, which provides a useful platform to study the interactions of operating parameters and other factors in the complex processes of sludge dewatering and stabilisation, which supports the system design and optimisation of sludge treatment reed beds.