229

Reducing Consultation Waiting Time and Overtime in Outpatient Clinic:
Challenges and Solutions
Zhu Zhecheng Health Services & Outcomes Research, Singapore Heng Bee Hoon Health Services & Outcomes Research, Singapore Teow Kiok Liang Health Services & Outcomes Research, Singapore

Chapter 11

ABSTRACT
Outpatient clinics face increasing pressure to handle more appointment requests due to aging and growing population. The increase in workload impacts two critical performance indicators: consultation waiting time and clinic overtime. Consultation waiting time is the physical waiting time a patient spends in the waiting area of the clinic, and clinic overtime is the amount of time the clinic is open beyond its normal opening hours. Long consultation waiting time negatively affects patient safety and satisfaction, while long clinic overtime negatively affects the morale of clinic staff. This chapter analyzes the complexity of an outpatient clinic in a Singapore public hospital, and factors causing long consultation waiting time and clinic overtime. Discrete event simulation and design of experiments are applied to quantify the effects of the factors on consultation waiting time/clinic overtime. Implementation results show significant improvement once those factors are well addressed.
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-872-9.ch011

Copyright © 2012, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.

Reducing Consultation Waiting Time and Overtime in Outpatient Clinic

INTRODUCTION
An outpatient clinic is a private or public healthcare facility which is devoted to diagnosis and treatment of non-emergency patients (Gupta & Denton, 2008). There are many types of outpatient clinics and the functions and settings of outpatient clinics vary from country to country (Chand, et al., 2009;