Reorganising a service department: Central Patient Transportation

Abstract

This article describes a reengineering project in the Central Patient Transportation department at the University Hospital, Leuven, Belgium. The hospital management had the impression that this department was responsible for major disfunctions leading to long waiting times, unclear priorities, irregular patient flows, unbalanced capacity and labour usage, etc., leading to dissatisfaction among patients, medical staff and transport operators. The complexity of the many interlinked processes and parameters does not allow to develop a straightforward optimisation and simulation model. This article describes the methodologies used in order to reengineer the processes and the organisation. As a result, a decentralised organisational structure was implemented with improved planning procedures and transparent control mechanisms leading to improved overall performance.

Keywords:

• process analysis
• business reengineering
• clustering
• patient transportation
• decentralisation
• case study

Acknowledgement

The authors are grateful to Daniel De Coster and Christine van Rompuy from the University Hospital Gasthuisberg Leuven for their assistance and valuable constructive remarks during the project.