Improving the Efficiency of Hospital Porter Services, Part 1: Study Objectives and Results

Abstract

This article is the first of a 2-part series reporting the results of a 7-month study of porter operations at Vancouver General Hospital, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Part 1 describes the importance of efficient porter services, the system's operation at the time of the study, the challenges faced in carrying out the study, the performance measures developed, the recommendations, and the outcomes. Part 2 describes the simulation model that measured the impact of system changes and the linear programming model developed to improve porter schedules.

Improved workflow, sonographer productivity, and cost-effectiveness of echocardiographic service for inpatients by using miniaturized systems

“…Echocardiography is an invaluable diagnostic tool in daily cardiology practice, 1 and moving inpatients needing echocardiogram to the echocardiography laboratory (echo-lab) is usually required by present organization of hospital care services. 2 Standard echocardiographic equipments, while performant, are bulky and weight .200 kg, and are difficult to manoeuvre. Therefore, performing the echocardiographic studies directly at bedside is unfeasible in the majority of cases and may cause damage to costly equipment and injury to personnel.…”

“…Moving inpatients to the echo-lab causes patients' discomfort and increases hospital service costs, since requires porters, it is associated to delays in exam delivery and overcrowding of the echo-lab, and annoys the patients who have to wait out of the echo-lab before and after the exam. 2 These limitations are particularly striking in multiple-stands hospitals.…”

Reducing Wait Times through Operations Research: Optimizing the Use of Surge Capacity

“…The team identified porter services and patient scheduling as promising areas for investigation. As a result, we reviewed porter services (Odegaard et al 2007) and sought to develop new methods to improve patient scheduling . This paper translates the latter research into a decision-making context.…”

Modeling the impact of changing patient transportation systems on peri-operative process performance in a large hospital: insights from a computer simulation study

“…To our knowledge, there are relatively few studies of hospital transportation systems [8][9][10][11][12]; these approaches seem to be rather limited to the specific applications in question [12]. The focus of most operations research literature in healthcare is investigating systems with relatively simple structure, such as appointments in an outpatient practice [13], desired level of staffing in a medical department [14][15][16], or surgery scheduling [17,18].…”