The UK National Blood Service (NBS) is a public funded body that is responsible for distributing blood and associated products. A discrete-event simulation of the NBS supply chain in the Southampton area has been built using the commercial off-the-shelf simulation package (CSP) Simul8. This models the relationship in the health care supply chain between the NBS Processing, Testing and Issuing (PTI) facility and its associated hospitals. However, as the number of hospitals increase simulation run time becomes inconveniently large. Using distributed simulation to try to solve this problem, researchers have used techniques informed by SISO's CSPI PDG to create a version of Simul8 compatible with the High Level Architecture (HLA). The NBS supply chain model was subsequently divided into several sub-models, each running in its own copy of Simul8. Experimentation shows that this distributed version performs better than its standalone, conventional counterpart as the number of hospitals increases.
Several factors are expected to significantly increase stakeholders' interest in healthcare simulation studies in the foreseeable future, e.g., the use of metrics for performance measurement, and increasing patients' expectations. To cater to this, several strategies may have to be implemented in concert, e.g., development of skilled manpower and engagement with academia. The focus of this paper is on one such strategy -model reusability. The paper reports on an ongoing study that investigates the outpatient capacity and demand for specialist hematology services. The primary objective of this study is to test strategies for service consolidation. Yet another objective is to model the simulation with the granularity that would enable the model to reused in similar operations context. The paper discusses the reusability aspect and presents an overview of the hematology OPD case study; since this is an ongoing study the results of the simulation are not presented in this paper.
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