About the project

Patient flow logistics increasingly is a concern for health care systems worldwide. Problems of patient flow management have been associated with a variety of problems for care ranging from short supplies, bottlenecks, long queues, and delays for the patients to high and unpredictable workload for health care staff. In disasters, however, these problems are exacerbated by the tremendous surge of patients that rapidly need care. The Covid19 pandemic has highlighted the problems of overloaded health care systems, with regular threats of a ‘code black’, clinics diverting patients or ambulances, and overloaded GPs with important implications for patient safety but also hospital finances. Further, disasters disrupt a variety of critical infrastructures, ranging from blocked roads and power outages to disruptions of the information systems. 

Scientifically, this is an interesting project that brings together two seemingly disparate domains: patient logistics and disaster logistics. There are few empirical studies that bring these two together and therefore can enable decision-makers to know what to do in case of a disaster. Even within these domains there are gaps to fill: capacity management (i.e. planning) for hospitals tends to be non-integrated: different departments deal with patient logistics, planning workforce and planning supplies such as devices and equipment. Finally, patient flow managemenet tends to focus on what happens within a hospital, and not how we get patients to the hospital in disaster situations. 

In this project, we aim to make a headway in overcoming these gaps by developing a new comprehensive model and approach that starts from the patient flows throughout the health care system against the backdrop of disrupted infrastructures and high levels of uncertainty. Our approach integrates the various decisions that need to be taken during the patient journey for different disaster scenarios.