“Most efforts to improve wait times focus on creating more value for customers with fewer resources to eliminate inefficiencies in specific health care settings,” says David Stanford, a statistics and actuarial sciences professor in Western’s Faculty of Science and the Co-Chair, CanQueue 2012. “However, to achieve optimum wait times, decision makers need to possess an appreciation of congestion phenomena fundamentals like how randomness affects wait times and how to respond accordingly.”
Research topics which will be explored over the two-day conference include queuing models for transplant wait times, scheduling MRI scans and routing of ambulances, the impact of flexibility in customer/patient choice on semi-pooled system wait times and queuing system models for ambulance offload delays.
Stanford says the importance of the queuing theory research is evident as keynote speakers include Dr. Chris Simpson, Chair, Wait Time Alliance, John G. Abbott, CEO, Health Council of Canada, Neil McEvoy, Director, Centre for Research in Healthcare Engineering and Shawn Thomas, Director, Diagnostic Imaging Program, Eastern Health, Newfoundland & Labrador.
For a complete schedule and more information, please visit https://www.stats.uwo.ca/CanQ_2012/
