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The DGHPSim Inpatient Model

The DGHPSim inpatient model manages simulated patients' stays on hospital wards. Inpatient wards are used to treat elective and emergency patients. Elective patients are usually admitted from a waiting list after one or more outpatient consultations. They may spend less than 24 hours in the hospital as day cases or may remain for several days. Emergency patients either come direct from GPs or via the A&E unit.

DGHPSim inpatient model

The length of stay of individual simulated patients varies within the model, following which they are discharged. An inpatient may require within-hospital transfers to other wards or units. For example the typical jourmey of emergency patients starts on an Emergency Admission Unit from which they are moved to a surgical or medical ward.

Ward Transition Matrices
The DGHPSim inpatient model uses Ward Transtion Matrices (WTMs) to simulate inpatient movements between wards or units. These are used for keeping patients transfer probabilities between wards/units. The WTMs hold the probabilities are transfers for each specialty and for each patient type. HADA is used, before running a simulation, to calculate values needed in the WTMs.

An example is given below, for Emergency patients admitted to the General Medicine specialty.

Ward Transition Matrix

In this matrix,the first column (blue) is "from wards" and the first row is "to wards". Wards are grouped in this matrix, eg.GMED is for Medical Wards, GSUR is for Surgical Wards. Wards are grouped, based on length of stay distributions).

Inpatient Model Inputs
There are three key inputs in this model; HADA is used to compute these before running a simulation

Inpatient Model Outputs
Outputs from the model are;