Reference no: EM132289872
It is now flu season at Patch-Em-Up emergency health services. Accordingly, the demand rate at the Patch-Em-Up clinic has increased to 50 patient arrivals per hour. In addition, the time that nurses spend with patients has increased, so Patch-Em-Up has made a number of changes. First, they hired more nurses, but they also assigned some of these nurses to perform an initial “triage” interview with patients before having the patient see a more highly trained nurse practitioner. Patch-Em-Up currently has 6 registered nurses working in the triage resource pool, plus 8 nurse practitioners (NPs). A triage nurse spends 5 minutes with each patient, on average, before sending the patient to the pool of NPs. An NP spends an average of 12 minutes with each patient.
1) Which resource pool is the bottleneck in this process?
a. Triage nurses
b. Nurse practitioners
c. Neither triage nor NP
2) What is the capacity of the process?
3) Given the data in the problem, what is the utilization of the NP resource pool?
4) Patch-Em-Up predicts that, by having a triage nurse spend one more minute with each patient, this can save two minutes per patient for the nurse practitioner, on average. If they make this change, will it change the utilization of the NP resource pool?
a. Yes
b. No
c. It cannot be determined from the data provided