DGHPSIM:

Abstract

The British National Health Service (NHS) has a performance management framework that aims to guarantee short waiting times for patients by including mandatory targets for hospitals. DGHPSim is a suite of four components that simulates the activities of an NHS general hospital to show the effect of different policies on waiting times in these hospitals. DGHPSim has a generic structure that is used to simulate a particular hospital by employing data appropriate to that hospital from available data sets. Two of the components of DGHPSim, the accident and emergency simulator and the outpatient simulator, may be used independently as stand-alone simulators of these hospital functions. The DGHPSim suite incorporates a novel way of simulating the multitasking behavior of clinicians and uses transition matrices, extracted from standard datasets, to represent the states through which patients pass and the wards in which they may be treated. As a whole, the DGHPSim suite may be used to investigate improvement options before their implementation or to investigate how a hospital has improved its performance. We show how DGHPSim is used to investigate reported performance improvements in an English general hospital.