Abstract for: A Hospital Resources Model for Pandemic Planning & Preparedness

Hospital resources are always limited and there are dependencies between resources which can cause bottlenecks. This presentation describes a combined epidemiological and hospital resources model developed using the system dynamics method in collaboration with European public health agencies and hospital managers. The epidemiological model provides the stream of hospitalisations to the resource model, which models the movement of patients through the main patient pathways, namely wards, ICU and overflows. As the hospital patients occupy or consume resources, the model recalculates resource availability dynamically. Access to ward and ICU for incoming patients is constrained according to current availability of beds, nurses, ventilators and PPE. The model runs on Stella Simulator and is integrated with the Pandem-2 dashboard via APIs that support adjustments to model input parameters and return simulation results to the dashboard. Comprehensive dashboard visualisations provide estimated demand for resources over time, bed occupancy rates, peak daily demand, likely resource gaps and indicators of the level of stress on the hospital system. Interventions such as public health policies, therapeutic treatments and surge strategies can be applied singly or in combination, and their effects on key indicators compared over multiple runs, supporting complex evidence-based decision-making through experimentation.