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The Kidney and Oncology Departments at Zagazig University Hospital are suffering from increased demand and limited capacity. Arrival patients who find all beds occupied are simply turned away, i.e., no waiting is allowed. This paper investigates the impact of an early discharge approach that can be applied to patients that have been scheduled to discharge within 5 h. A discrete event simulation (DES) model is built using empirical distributions based on real data. The model has been validated against real data and the results have shown that the proposed early discharge approach can reduce the number of turned away patients by 10% in the Kidney Department, equivalent to 182 patients annually and by 11% in the Oncology Department, equivalent to 150 patients annually.
Mohamed et al. (Wed,) studied this question.