Working with capacity limitations: Operations management in critical care

As your hospital's ICU director, you are approached by the hospital's administration to help solve ongoing problems with ICU bed availability. The ICU seems to be constantly full, and trauma patients in the emergency department sometimes wait up to 24 hours before receiving a bed. Additionally, the cardiac surgeons were forced to cancel several elective coronary-artery bypass graft cases because there was not a bed available for postoperative recovery. The hospital administrators ask whether you can decrease your ICU length of stay, and wonder whether they should expand the ICU to include more beds For help in understanding and optimizing your ICU's throughput, you seek out the operations management researchers at your university. © 2011 BioMed Central Ltd