Using DES to Improve the Efficiency of a Covid-19 Vaccination Centre

Abstract

Many research and development teams around the world have developed and continue to improve Covid-19 vaccines. As vaccines are produced, preparedness and planning for mass vaccination and immunization has become an important aspect of the pandemic management. Mass vaccination has been used by public health agencies in the past and is a viable option for Covid-19 immunization. To be able to rapidly and safely immunize a large number of people against Covid-19, mass vaccination centres are accessible in the UK. Careful planning of these centres is a difficult and important job. Two key considerations are the capacity of each centre (measured as the number of patients served per hour) and the time (in minutes) spent by patients in the centre. This paper discusses a simulation study done to support this planning effort. In this paper, we explore the operations of a vaccination centre and use a simulation tool to enhance patient flow. The discrete event simulation (DES) tool outputs visually and numerically show the average and maximum patient flow times and the number of people that can be served (throughput values) under different number of patient arrivals (hourly). With some experimentation, the results show that marginally reducing the hourly arrival rate, patient congestion reduces enabling good patient service levels to be achieved.