Journal of

Background: Deciding on the number of hospital beds is one of the most serious challenges managers face. More hospital beds result in higher running cost although less hospital beds might cause disorder in patients flow.  Minimizing total cost besides maximizing the patients flow in a hospital network, considering the practical limitations is the main objective of this survey.

Materials & Methods: This study had main steps to investigate following: identifying current limitations of changing capacity of each ward, by conducting interview with hospital managers and other personnel of Modares hospital, analyzing cardiac patient flow analysis, simulating current flow, determining practical scenarios and choosing the best among them by mathematical modeling could minimize total cost and maximize patient flow.

Results: 31 practical scenarios have been determined and analyzed by surveying limitations among all existing scenarios. Finally, eight best scenarios had been selected. Results showed that decreasing the number of beds in CCU and increasing the number of beds in Post-CCU can improve patients flow, considering cost limitations.     

Conclusion: A recommended approach in this study can be a general guide for capacity planning with taking practical limitations into consideration. This survey could be useful for the managers who are against the benefits of post CCU  by comparing the patient flow with and without this ward.

Background: Today, one of the most important issues in hospital site selection is to consider the equity. This study aimed to provide a multi-objective model for fair Hospital site selection considering cost and use for hospitals construction in the future.
Materials and Methods: This study was an analytical-descriptive one conducted to determine the best locations for hospitals construction with respect to criteria of equity in Rasht city. For this purpose, after literature review, a three-objective model consist of p-median, p-envy and equitable loads objects was proposed; and the Rasht city was analyzed by model using the real data. In order to achieve the results and comparisons, the total weighting technique from the multi-objective decision-making techniques was used and solved with GAMS 24.1.1 software.
Results: This research can assist the decision-makers to consider the equity criteria to Hospital site selection in addition to the costs. Citizenship equity establishment and increasing in hospitals efficiency along with cost considerations can be regarded as the major achievements of this research for decision-makers in the health field.
Conclusion: Lack of proper attention to equity criteria hospital site selection, the results can be very unfair and can lead to irreparable consequences. This case study indicated the desirable function of the proposed model in hospital site selection with respect to the citizenship equity criteria in Rasht city. This study results can be given to managers as the proper basis for decision-making.