Covenant Hospital Clinic Staffing
Covenant Hospital operates a main hospital and three outlying clinics in a medium-size city. All four locations perform similar outpatient services, and patients typically visit the location nearest them. The hospital has recently had more congestion—longer waiting lines—than it (or its patients) would like. As part of a study to learn the causes of these long lines and to suggest possible solutions, all locations have kept track of customer arrivals during 1-hour intervals for the past 10 weeks. All locations are open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. and on Saturday from 9 a.m. until noon. For each location, the hospital and clinics collected data that contains the number of customer arrivals during each hour of a 10-week period. The manager of Covenant has hired you to make some sense of these data. Specifically, your task is to present charts and/or tables that indicate how customer traffic into the hospital locations varies by day of week and hour of day. There is also interest in whether any daily or hourly patterns you observe are stable across weeks. Although you don’t have full information about the way the hospital currently runs its operations—you know only its customer arrival pattern and the fact that it is currently experiencing long lines—you are encouraged to append any suggestions for improving operations based on your analysis of the data.
Review this week’s case and the Covenant Hospital data file and reflect on what analyses might be required to address the manager’s request.
