Towards a New Approach for Developing Patient Flow in Emergency Department: Sahloul and Hached Hospitals Case Study

Health establishment seek to provide patients with the best possible service. Improving the reception and care of patients is the ambition of all emergency departments in care facilities. The mission of the Emergency Department (ED) is to provide a medical assessment and appropriate treatment to any person in distress, in practice for any matter that arises. It is interesting for hospitals to talk about the logistics involved in material flow management and the logistics involved in patient flow management. The performance of the hospital is deeply joined to the overall performance of the services that make it up, in particular the emergency department. Managing patient flow at the emergency department level is one of the most important issues to be controlled by hospital branches. The random arrival of patients in the emergency department is the particularity of the latter compared to other departments of the hospital. The length of stay at the emergency reception is one of the daily problems of these services, such as the increase in emergency room admissions exceeding day-to-day care capacity has led services to organize themselves to improve their performance and thus increase the number of patients treated and decrease the stay. In this work, we propose an approach to resolve the congestion by recoiling patient waiting time as a sign for service quality. We choose quality function deployment (QFD) in resolving this case to correspond the Tunisian reality.