Waiting time-based staff capacity and shift planning at blood collection sites

Abstract

Sanquin, the organization responsible for blood collection in the Netherlands, aims to be donorfriendly. An important part of the perception of donor-friendliness is the experience of waiting times. At the same time, Sanquin needs to control the costs for blood collection. A significant step to shorten waiting times is to align walk-in arrivals, and staff capacity and shifts. We suggest a two-step procedure. First, we investigate two methods from queuing theory to compute the minimum number of staff members required for every half hour. Next, these minimum numbers of staff members will be used to determine optimal lengths and starting times of shifts with an Integer Linear Program. Finally, the practical implications of the method are shown with numerical results. These results show that the presented approach can bring significant savings while at the same time guaranteeing a waiting time-based service level for blood donors.

Queue length computation of time-dependent queueing networks and its application to blood collection

“…It is interesting to note that whilst the first of these shows clear improvements, the second shows no significant reductions of the total number of people present. Scenario C is based on previous work by the authors [14].…”

“…The application area of blood collection sites has been studied before, as can be seen in [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. Most of these papers describe a setting that is inherently time dependent.…”

“…The changes proposed in these sections are quite obvious, but using our method, we can show and predict the effects these changes have on queue length distributions at the blood collection site, while taking time-dependent aspects into account. We will also show the effects of applying the staff scheduling algorithm previously developed for blood collection sites [14].…”

“…In a recent paper, van Brummelen et al [14] have developed a methodology to determine the optimal shift schedule for staff members, with regards to arrival patterns. The paper mainly focuses on the savings on the number of staff hours required.…”

A discrete‐event simulation model for analysing and improving operations in a blood donation centre

“…Several techniques can be applied to study blood collection, for example evaluation of best practices, linear and integer programming, queuing models and Markov decision processes [ 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 ]; however, simulation‐based works outnumbered those with any other solution method over the years. Indeed, simulation is a rather effective approach to address BDSC management problems, according to Beliën and Forcé [ 15 ], because of the complexity of the system.…”