ArticleHealth care management science2017
Flexible bed allocations for hospital wards.
Article in Health care management science, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Optimizing patient flow logistics: strategic challenges, tactical solutions, and future directions.BMC health services research · 2025Pooled it
- The effect of diets delivered into the gastrointestinal tract on gut motility after colorectal surgery-a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials.European journal of clinical nutrition · 2019Pooled it
- Barriers, Facilitators, and Strategies for Sustaining the Hospital-Wide "One Bed" Model in China: A Single-Centre Descriptive Qualitative Study of Healthcare Professionals' Perspectives.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- A Markov decision optimization of medical service resources for two-class patient queues in emergency departments via particle swarm optimization algorithm.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- A study of a loss system with priorities.Heliyon · 2024Article
- Information management of full-cycle inpatient bed reservation for cancer patients under the normalised prevention and control of the COVID-19 pandemic.BMC health services research · 2024Article
- Team Size and Composition in Home Healthcare: Quantitative Insights and Six Model-Based Principles.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- The working experience of medical staff in the hospital-wide bed-sharing mode: A qualitative study.Nursing open · 2023Article
- Hospital bed capacity across in Tunisia hospital during the first 4 waves of the COVID-19 pandemic: A descriptive analysis.Infectious medicine · 2023Article
- Hospital Organizational Structure and Information Processing: An Entropy Perspective.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Surgical scheduling by Fuzzy model considering inpatient beds shortage under uncertain surgery durations.Annals of operations research · 2022Article
- Flexibility and Bed Margins of the Community of Madrid's Hospitals during the First Wave of the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
- A hybrid analytical model for an entire hospital resource optimisation.Soft computing · 2021Article
- Dynamics of an orthopaedic team: Insights to improve teamwork through a design thinking approach.Work (Reading, Mass.) · 2018Article
- Optimizing Emergency Department Patient Flow Through Bed Allocation Strategies: A Discrete-Event Simulation Study.Inquiry : a journal of medical care organization, provision and financingArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Flexibility in the usage of clinical beds is considered to be a key element to efficiently organize critical capacity. However, full flexibility can have some major drawbacks as large systems are more difficult to manage, lack effective care delivery due to absence of focus and require multi-skilled medical teams. In this paper, we identify practical guidelines on how beds should be allocated to provide both flexibility and utilize specialization. Specifically, small scale systems can often benefit from full flexibility. Threshold type of control is then effective to prioritize patient types and to cope with patients having diverse lengths of stay. For large scale systems, we assert that a little flexibility is generally sufficient to take advantage of most of the economies of scale. Bed reservation (earmarking) or, equivalently, organizing a shared ward of overflow, then performs well. The theoretical models and guidelines are illustrated with numerical examples. Moreover, we address a key question stemming from practice: how to distribute a fixed number of hospital beds over the different units?
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.