Applying a simulation model in order to manage waiting lists for hospital inpatient activity in an EU region

The main aim of this work is to achieve reproducing by means of a simulation study the behaviour of the daily inpatient activity and the length of the inpatient stay in Galician public hospitals. Another important issue is studying how the number of beds in the hospital affects inpatient activity, the length of the stays and, consequently, the waiting list.In order to simulate the daily inpatient activity we have fitted a normal distribution to real inpatient activity data observed in 2009, whereas the Parzen–Rosenblatt estimator has been considered for estimating non-parametrically the stay length distribution in the same period. Moreover, the effect of the number of beds on inpatient activity has been modelled by means of a linear regression model where the number of beds is the covariate and the median of daily inpatient activity is the response.A simulation study is also presented to show the practical behaviour of these procedures in two different scenarios: firstly, assuming that the effect of the number of beds does not exist, and then assuming that the number of hospital beds has a ‘linear’ influence on inpatient activity. In this way, the proposed study turns into an aid for analysing and modifying a complex hospital system, allowing consideration of far more detail and providing more reliable results than would otherwise be possible. Furthermore, it allows us to examine the drop in waiting list numbers due to new-bed allocations in a simple way.