How do you move a group of patients escorted by a single staff member?

[lou_keller]

[ FlexSim HC 5.0.12 ]

A psychiatric outpatient clinic in a large medical center holds group counseling sessions usually attended by no less than 10 patients at a time. Patients arrive individually, take a seat in a waiting room, and once 10 patients are present, all ten are escorted by a single staff member to a nearby meeting room where they take individual seats around a large community table. Once the counseling session is concluded, individual patients leave the clinic unescorted.

[sam_stubbsYXX86]

I think there's another post here on our Answers forum that answers your question fairly well.

You can find a link to it here.

[adrian_haws · Accepted solution]

Hi Lou,

As @Sam Stubbs mentioned, another user has tried to do patient "batching" in the past. However, your situation is slightly different as you need a staff member to escort the patients together. I don't know all of the specifics of your model, but I've created a sample model (attached below) that does what you explained. I used basically the same code as in the link that Sam attached, with slight variations.

Note: I'm not sure whether it's possible to have a staff resource escort more than one patient at a time. I made it appear to be so by kicking off two activities at once (one for the staff member to escort one patient, and the other for the group of nine patients to travel unattended).

[adrian_haws]

@Lou Keller

You may be interested in an updated version of the example model I made. In this model, I made just a few changes based on how you said the model works:

1. Since more than 10 patients might come to the meeting, I changed the capacity of the Waiting Room and the Chair Area. I then edited the code in the Activity Finished Trigger for the activity 10_Arrival to fire if there are ten or more patients, and for the number of the "batch" of patients to be equal to the amount of patients in the waiting room.
2. Because the meeting is for a certain time, I added a condition to the trigger mentioned above to fire at a certain time (a few minutes before the meeting). Then I changed the arrival pattern to use an Appointments table, where most of the patients arrive about ten minutes early, with some variability. Then if a patient arrives after the group has been seated at the table, they go to a new activity (using Predecessors) called 22_Late Arrivals to Meeting that sends them by themselves to the meeting table.
3. I set up a Network Node Path for the patients' seating at the table.

Model attached below.

[lou_keller]

Thanks, Adrian, I appreciate your extra effort!