Team-based Staffing Optimization for an Urgent and Primary Care Centre

Urgent and primary care centres (UPCCs) provide both walk-in services for urgent healthcare needs and booked appointments for longitudinal care. UPCCs utilize multi-disciplinary teams of healthcare professionals who collaborate to provide client care. This thesis develops a new approach to optimize team-based staffing at a UPCC in Vancouver, British Columbia. The core of the approach is a discrete event simulation that estimates client access indicators based on the UPCC operational profile and client visit data. The analysis compares two algorithms that minimize staffing levels subject to access targets given by the time-dependent expected proportion of simulated clients who leave due to a prolonged wait. One approach combines an extension of an iterative, simulation-based algorithm for small-interval staffing with an integer programming formulation for shift-based staffing. Another approach optimizes shift-based staffing through simulation optimization. Both approaches make staffing recommendations to improve care access.