Simulation of a schedule-based mass vaccination clinic

ABSTRACT

The insurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic has compelled many countries to set up vaccination clinics to carry out mass vaccination campaigns. Though sizing a clinic impacts both costs and service quality, and costs must be scaled up nationwide, those clinics and their staffing have often been put into service without a proper design phase. In this paper, we propose a simulator that allows us to analyse a vaccination clinic’s performance and optimise its capacity and staff level, considering typical schedule-based operations. Though a trade-off is unavoidable between cost and service quality, the latter being represented by the throughput time, we show that we can achieve a significant increase in the efficient use of nurses’ time with a small sacrifice in service quality, i.e., a small increase of the throughput time.

KEYWORDS:

• Vaccination
• pandemics
• decision support systems
• health management
• vaccination clinics
• COVID-19

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/info-by-product/clinical-considerations

2. The data of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistic concerning registered nurses can be retrieved on the page www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/registered-nurses.htm, which we consulted on Oct 22, 2021