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Background: Allocation of scarce resources presents an in-creasing challenge to hospital administrators and health policy makers. Intensive care units can present bottlenecks within busy hospitals, but their expansion is costly and difficult to gauge. Although mathematical tools have been suggested for determining the proper number of intensive care beds neces-sary to serve a given demand, the performance of such models has not been prospectively evaluated over significant periods. Methods: The authors prospectively collected 2 years ’ admis-sion, discharge, and turn-away data in a busy, urban intensive care unit. Using queuing theory, they then constructed a math-ematical model of patient flow, compared predictions from the model to observed performance of the unit, and explored the sensitivity of the model to changes in unit size. Results: The queuing model proved to be very accurate, with
Reuven Pizov (Wed,) studied this question.