REPLY SD Impact on National Government Policies (SD6153)

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Posted by  "Douglas McKelvie" <d.mckelvie at virgin.net>

Re John Gunkler's point about the need to be able to build a model for under
a million dollars...

I'm not a regular poster so for those who don't know me, I work with Eric
Wolstenholme and others in the UK, mainly around health and social care,
with some criminal justice and workforce planning occasionally thrown into
the mix,

It strikes me that the small size of project that UK government bodies are
prepared to fund (typically around 20 - 30 days) means that we have to move
quickly to create useful models, but also constrains our ability to publish
as much as we should about what we are doing.

Working recently on a hospital redesign project, I started by showing the
group a one stock model, admissions(flow) - patients in beds (stock) and
discharges(flow driven by average length of stay), and asked them to tell me
their normal admission rate, average length of stay, and normal
bed-occupancy level. I suppose you could not call that SD since it had no
feedback - it was mainly an introduction to some building blocks.

Needless to say, the numbers they produced did not remotely add up (we're
pretty sure that it is "length of stay" that they have not measured
properly - it is probably double what they thought it was).

The most important point is that the members of our small group were amazed
by - and grateful for - this insight.

We've since moved on to build a "proper" model, but I'd have to say that
nothing so far has matched this initial revelation. It also shows the
benefit of starting with a running model, however simple.

Posted by  "Douglas McKelvie" <d.mckelvie at virgin.net>
posting date  Sat, 6 Jan 2007 13:22:23 -0000