Hospital bed management modelling: A conceptual framework

Marco conceptual de las operaciones físicas y las decisiones de la gestión de camas: bloquear, diferir o desviar ingresos, reconfigurar camas y acelerar altas.

• Hospital
• Bed management
• Conceptual framework
• Patient flow

Resumen

Faced with the variability inherent in healthcare, hospitals prioritize operational adaptability and resilience by adjusting their strategies and processes to the current situation. This approach is crucial to mitigate the impact of such uncertainties and deliver seamless and efficient patient care. Hospital bed management (BM), essential for managing patient flow and optimizing resources, is at the heart of these efforts. However, the diversity of BM processes in different organizations makes it difficult to assess their effectiveness. This study explores the various strategies (including processes) employed in BM. BM involves handling admissions, discharges, and the configuration of beds. To identify such strategies (and build the conceptual framework), we map the physical operations (patient admissions, unit stays, and discharges) and build the logical system (decision-making processes related to these operations). Key practices include blocking, deferring, and diverting admissions; expanding or re-configuring beds through ward reservations and flexibility to adjust bed capacity to demand; and expediting discharges. Our study emphasizes that the strategies used in BM, show limitations of BM adaptability. We believe that designing models that integrate these adaptive strategies is an unavoidable future line of research. An example of this would be the development of models that ensure responsiveness to varying levels of demand by integrating dynamic responses into bed management strategies.

BibTeX

@incollection{lacort2025hospital,
  title = {Hospital bed management modelling: A conceptual framework},
  author = {Lacort, Alberto and Lahrichi, Nadia and Maheut, Julien},
  editor = {Juan, Angel A. and Faulin, Javier and Lopez-Lopez, David},
  booktitle = {Decision sciences},
  volume = {14779},
  pages = {172--180},
  publisher = {Springer Nature Switzerland},
  address = {Cham},
  doi = {10.1007/978-3-031-78241-1_16},
  isbn = {978-3-031-78240-4},
  year = {2025}
}

Última actualización: 1 de octubre de 2026