Abstract:
Minimizing the waiting times improves customer attraction in service organizations. It would
create much profit and greater customer satisfaction. Therefore, queuing performance is an important measure for privately owned medical centres. This study selected such a medical centre
forming an unnecessary queuing with patients daily. Accordingly, the main objective was to
model the system and analyse its queuing behavior to provide further improvements. In this
medical centre, only one doctor provided the service to the customers. The patients had to wait
much time in the waiting line to meet the doctor. Just after checking, the patients went to the
pharmacy in the medical centre. Thus all patients checking, prescribing and issuing medicines
and payment handling were done by him. This created long waiting times for the patients.
Therefore, the study identified this system as a single server queuing system with finite waiting
room capacity and infinite population. The observations were done in three weekdays from 4.30
to 6.30 pm at the medical centre. The sample included 100 observations. The times relevant to
patients’ arrival and service receiving were recorded as primary data in the study. They were
analysed using the student version of Rockwell ARENA 14.5. The assumptions were made on
patients’ arrivals to be random and independent. Also the service discipline was considered as
First In First Out. Then the system was modelled in ARENA interface and simulated for two
hours. The results showed that the service rate of the doctor was 50%. The average number
in the queue at doctor checking was five patients. Further, the average waiting time of a patient in the queues at doctor checking was 41.23 minutes. The doctor spent 19.61 minutes in
average for a checking of a patient and 14.54 minutes to do the remaining tasks. Therefore, the
results ensured the existing problem having a single person for many purposes in this system.
The time was wasted because the doctor moved to several places in the medical centre for each
patient and performed several tasks. Therefore, the study thoroughly recommended to assign a
pharmacist to issue the medicine and a cashier to handle payments in advanced considering the
financial feasibility.
