Improving Service Delivery through Facility Layout Optimization: A Process Mapping Analysis in Teklehaimanot Health Center
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Date
2024-07
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Teklehaimanot Health Center plays a crucial role in providing healthcare service to the community in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. However, providing service with short waiting and service time to the community has been presented as a challenge in the healthcare facility. Teklehaimanot Health Center still struggles to deliver quality service to patients due to suboptimal layout design of the health center facility. This paper aims to optimize the facility layout of the outpatient department to improve the service delivery of Teklehaimanot Health Center. The objective is to develop a health center facility layout in Teklehaimanot Health Center that will improve service delivery by exchanging the department room by considering patient path. The research methodology consists of qualitative and quantitative data collection related to the time for every operation that takes place under the outpatient department. The proposed research integrates process mapping analysis, time study, facility layout techniques, multi-criteria decision making, and simulation to address the issue presented. Service time and waiting time are the key measuring variables. From the existing facility, a redesigned layout is developed, and simulation is used to validate the new optimized layout. By utilizing process mapping analysis integrated with time study and facility layout improvement, the research provides data-driven recommendations for the health center facility layout with minimum unnecessary movement of patients and minimum travel distance. The impact is evaluated by measuring the variables of service and waiting time the improvements in waiting time and service time achieved through the facility layout changes are likely very significant and impactful for the Teklehaimanot Health Center. Based on the result, the optimized proposed facility layout minimizes the average waiting time from 2.5 hours to 2.01 hours, which is a 19.60% reduction, and minimizes the service time from 0.79 hours to 0.64 hours, which is an 18.98% reduction. This shows a positive impact on improving service delivery and patient satisfaction in the health center.
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Keywords
Service Delivery, Patient Satisfaction, Facility Layout, Service Improvement, Health Center