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Operation Management

1) Calculate the capacity of the hospital and identify the bottleneck. Assume i) Assistant Surgeons have no impact on the current capacity of the hospital; and ii) 50% of the patients spend 3 nights at the hospital and the rest spend 4 nights.
a. Examination Capacity
1:00-3:00 pm Arriving Waiting Room
20 minutes Examination
40 minutes Other Administrative Details
3:20 pm End of Last Examination
4:00 pm End of Last Administrative Details
4:30 pm Information, Dinner etc
9:00 pm Tea & Cookies
Waiting room capacity and reception capacity are not the issues here. Waiting rooms typically have large capacities in hospitals and are easy to expand. Reception is also easy to expand because most of the staff is able to give information, perform paper work, and direct patients to their rooms. The only possible bottleneck here is examination capacity. There are six examination rooms, allowing Shouldice to examine one patient at a time per room. The examination period starts at 1:00 pm and ends at 3:20 pm; therefore, the total examination time is 140 minutes. Surgeons can examine patients at 140 (total minutes per room) / 20 (minutes per patient) = 7 patients/examination room every day. Since the hospital only accepts patients one day before operations, we can therefore assume no patients are accepted on Friday and Saturday. We can also assume patients are accepted on Sunday for Monday operations. Therefore, examination capacity is 6 exam rooms*7 patients/exam room per day = 42 new patients/day and 42 patients/day*5 exam days/operating week = 210 patients/week.  
b. Operating Room Capacity
The surgeons operate 315 minutes from 7:15 am to 12:30 pm (morning shift), and 165 minutes from 1:15 pm to 4:00 pm (afternoon shift).   A scrubbing (15 minutes) is done after each operation, and one 15-minute coffee break is taken after a surgeon’s second or third operation.  
Five hours = 300 minutes                
Morning: 315 (total minutes) - 15 (coffee time) = 300 minutes...