Reducing Overcrowding at the Emergency Department Through a Different Physician and Nurse Shift Organisation: A Case Study

Overcrowding is a widespread problem affecting the performance of an Emergency Department (ED). In this paper we deal with the overcrowding problem at the ED sited at Ospedale Sant’Antonio Abate di Cantù, Italy. Exploiting the huge amounts of data collected by the ED, we propose a new agent-based simulation model to analyse the real impact on the ED overcrowding of a different physicians and nurses shift organisations. The proposed simulation model demonstrates its capability of analysing the ED performance from a patient-centred perspective.