Glossary · approach
Bed Allocation
The decision problem of which patient is admitted to which ward and bed, and when — under clinical compatibility, isolation, gender-separation and nurse-staffing constraints.
Hospital Bed AllocationBed AssignmentWard Assignment
Bed Allocation is the decision problem a hospital operator faces of deciding, given a stream of incoming patients (emergency admissions from ER and scheduled elective admissions), which ward and which bed each patient is assigned and at which hour, under constraints of clinical compatibility (cardiac patients to cardiology, internal to internal medicine and so on), isolation rules (infection precautions, immunocompromised patients), gender separation in shared rooms, nurse-to-patient ratio per shift, and the intensive-care step-down chain. Bachouch, Guinet and Hajri-Gabouj (2012) provide a canonical integer linear (MIP) formulation; Cochran and Bharti (2006) provide a Markov-chain bed-pool balance model for capacity planning. Typical objectives: minimum off-service placement penalty (each off-service placement costs an extra 0.5-2 days of stay), minimum ED boarding, balanced ward utilisation, minimum elective cancellations. Bed Allocation is usually solved jointly with Patient Flow modelling.
Örnek
A 200-bed mid-size hospital runs a daily MIP bed-allocation model: feeding morning ED arrivals plus the day's scheduled elective admissions, the model cuts off-service placements by 25% versus the prior manual placement and reduces average length of stay by 0.6 days.