Emergency department staffing: a separated continuous linear programming approach (Q473971)

Summary: The emergency department (ED) overcrowding is becoming serious in recent years. The shortage of ED staff is considered to be a common factor to contribute to the ED overcrowding. In this paper, we present a new model to address the ED staffing from a macroscopic perspective. The model is a kind of optimization model called separated continuous linear programming (SCLP). By using the efficient algorithm for SCLP, we can get the ED staffing level which minimizes the total cost of the patients and the ED.