- 12 Marks
MA – April 2022 – L2 – Q2a – Activity-based costing
Evaluate the bottleneck resource at Pikambi Hospital and suggest ways to reduce turnaround time.
Question
The Pikambi Hospital serves a community with a population of about 20,000. For Out Patients Department (OPD) services, there are three basic stages to seeing the doctor which have been described below:
Stage 1
Records: This is where files of patients are kept. On arrival, a patient presents the identity card together with the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) card. There are two biometric verification machines to confirm the validity of the card and recording of basic personal data on the claim forms. The process takes approximately 10 minutes per machine. Workers here work from 6:00 am to 4:00 pm.
Stage 2
Vitals: Here vital personal information about the patient’s current health status is checked; i.e. temperature, pulse, blood pressure, weight, and sugar levels. There is one machine with 5 nurses. It takes some 6 minutes for one patient to go through the process. The unit also works from 6:00 am to 4:00 pm.
Stage 3
Consultation: There are six doctors who run six-hour shifts a day. Each doctor spends an average of 15 minutes seeing a patient. The community has been complaining about the turnaround period and blames it on the incompetence of the nurses to the extent that sometimes patients stay in queues for long hours and return home unattended.
Required:
i) With appropriate computations, evaluate and assess the bottleneck resource(s) at Pikambi Hospital. (6 marks)
ii) Suggest THREE (3) ways by which the turnaround time can be reduced at the hospital. (6 marks)
Find Related Questions by Tags, levels, etc.
- Tags: Bottleneck Resources, Hospital Management, Process Improvement, Turnaround Time
- Level: Level 2
- Topic: Activity-based costing
- Series: APR 2023