Streamlining Hospital Planning: A User‐Friendly Decision Support Tool for Enhanced Healthcare Delivery

Healthcare providers worldwide face challenges in maintaining a delicate balance between rising demand and limited resources. Decision-makers often struggle with planning and implementing new services, leading to costly consequences and hindering efficiency, patient outcomes, and staff well-being. Current systems lack a comprehensive modelling approach that encompasses all aspects of the hospital and fails to generate crucial outputs. Moreover, these tools often require expert modelers, limiting their usability for end users such as service managers, clinicians, and management. To address this gap, a user-friendly decision support tool (DST) is developed that empowers key decision-makers to assess the impact of interventions across all hospital operations. Our DST utilises a discrete event simulation model, encompassing specialties and interconnections among hospital services. The model incorporates a dataset of 360 input parameters and statistical distributions, providing a holistic understanding of operations. Through scenarios from 2023-2027, our DST generated diverse outputs, including activity levels, bed and clinic requirements, theatre utilization, and financial implications. Notably, implementing a virtual ward reduced patient backlogs and eased strain on resources from 113% to 80%. Our adaptable DST enables informed decision-making, enhancing patient outcomes and optimising resource utilization. This user-friendly tool revitalises hospital operations for improved efficiency and effectiveness.