Health clinic capacity analysis using simulation

Wong, Yew Zhi (2025) Health clinic capacity analysis using simulation. Final Year Project, UTAR.

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Abstract

This research presents a comprehensive analysis of health clinic capacity management using Vensim System Dynamics simulation software to identify operational bottlenecks and develop improvement strategies for Malaysian public health clinics, introducing dynamic feedback mechanisms that allow service times to adapt automatically based on patient queue lengths to create a more realistic representation of how healthcare staff naturally adjust their working pace during busy periods. The enhanced simulation model systematically identified consultation services as the primary bottleneck limiting overall clinic performance, with outpatient consultation wait times reaching peak levels of 97.64 minutes during busy periods, and through comprehensive sensitivity analysis using 200 simulation runs, demonstrated that infrastructure improvements, particularly consultation room additions, provided significantly greater impact than staffing increases, with adding a single consultation room reducing consultation wait times by 45.5% whilst adding consultation doctors or nurses produced no measurable performance improvements. The research revealed important bottleneck shifting behaviour where resolving primary constraints caused bottlenecks to migrate to downstream service areas, leading to the identification of an optimal resource configuration requiring coordinated additions across multiple service components that achieved overall wait time reductions of 37.2% from baseline conditions, reducing average wait times from 43.77 minutes to 27.78 minutes whilst maintaining clinical quality standards. This methodology demonstrates the practical value of dynamic feedback simulation for healthcare capacity management, providing evidence-based guidance for resource allocation decisions that maximise patient care quality whilst ensuring operational efficiency, and offers a systematic framework for capacity analysis that can be applied to other Malaysian healthcare settings requiring operational improvement.

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