Discrete Event Simulation of Clients Flow in Ante-natal Clinic

Abstract

Clients (expecting mothers) wait for hours in ante-natal clinic to receive medical service – waiting before, during or after being served. This study deals with a dynamic queuing system. Results of the study evaluate the effectiveness of queuing simulation model by identifying the ante-natal clinic queuing system parameters in terms of server utilization, usage, and clients flow time. The study uses the Simmer package in R for Discrete-event Simulation of the clients' flow in the system. The study showed that the resources are highly utilized with a bottleneck at the Doctors station, with constant service time for all clients, and long waiting time in the system. By replicating the parameters or replicate the model execution, once, with different initial conditions (by adding resources) and then performing another simulation over the output, the result showed that the resources are utilized with no bottlenecks at each server station, constant activity and flow time for all clients (expecting mothers). Hence, the model has proved to be accurate and efficient. This will help the clinic to utilize the resources and reduce long flow time.