Answer Happy

Cardiac ICU Consider the following situation in the cardiac ICU at a large hospital. Patients admitted to the ICU from the operating room stay in the ICU, on average, for five days. This, however, assumes that patients do not develop complications. About 20% of the patients develop complications in the ICU. On average, these patients stay in the ICU for 13 days. Once discharged from the ICU, patients are moved to the cardiology ward. Here, they spend on average 4 days, assuming they develop no further complications. However, 5% of the patients develop complications in the ward and have to be readmitted to the ICU. In that case, they spend an additional 13 days in the ICU. They then come back to the ward, where they spend on average an additional 4 days. 1 For this analysis, you can ignore the effects of mortality. There are 12 beds in the ICU and 18 beds in the ward. CICU1. How many days (on average across all patients) will a patient spend in the ICU? CICU2. Where is the bottleneck in the process? CICU3. How many surgeries can the hospital perform per day (ignore any effects related to variability)? In other words, what is the process capacity? CICU4. How would your answer change if you factored in variability? a. The number of surgeries per day would increase. b. The number of surgeries per day would decrease. C. The number of surgeries per day would stay the same.