The topic is that hospital capacity for patient beds runs short. We wish to predict when this will occur. An inter-disciplinary approach to this problem is taken incorporating a Management Science / Operational Research perspective.
The subject is the Perinatal Network System, which is described, analysed and modelled. An illustrative Case Study is taken of an English local neonatal unit, where new-born babies are cared for. The focus is High dependency cots. Recommendations produced are subject to human factors and implementation difficulties.
In this work, Systems Thinking facilitates an understanding of relationships; Enterprise Architecture helps embed the context and address complexity; while Clinical Medicine underpins decision-making for individual patients.
Research outputs include the Conceptual Research Framework, a Quality Metric, a Cot Predictor Tool and a Markovian model Design, which can be adapted in the future. Furthermore there is the milieu or connective ‘glue’, to provide unity. The methodology or Enterprise Modelling helps address the issue by facilitating understanding of both overview and detail
