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Shouldice

Issues/BackgroundShouldice Hospital limited was started in 1940 by Dr. Earle Shouldice for treating Hernia. The method of surgery adopted by Shouldice Hospital was unique in a sense that it introduced the concept of flow shop in carrying out surgeries alongwith simplicity in surgery.  Because of this uniqueness and simplicity, the demand for surgeries at Shouldice increased and Shouldice has reached a point where it has to increase its capacity to reduce the wait times being faced by the patients. Presently, the hospital performs, on an average, 30 to 36 operations per day. The challenge is to devise a way of increasing the hospital capacity while maintaining the same quality standards, the role of government in the operations of the hospital and unauthorised use of Shouldice brand name by potential competitors. Assumptions:We have assumed that at all times ratio of patients coming from outside and local patients remain at 70:30 and surgeries has to be carried out maintaining the ratio.Analysis:Shouldice is already evaluating some options to increase the capacity of the hospital. Some of these are: 1. Increasing capacity of the hospital by increasing the number of beds and inculcating more staff.2. Operating on Saturdays and Sundays in order to increase the capacity by 20%.3. Expanding the capacity thereby entering in other specialist areas offering similar opportunities like eye surgery etc.4. Changing the scheduling of doctors.The way, the surgeries are carried out at Souldice, any patient needs to stay at hospital for at least 3 days. Appendix ‘B’ shows weekly maximum achievable throughput of 149 patients under the current operating cycle. Surgeon Capacity Analysis: In general, a typical first time surgery requires 45 minutes of surgeon time.  Surgeon requires 15 minutes to prepare for the next surgery. Thus, effectively a surgeon can undertake one first time surgery in an hour. Similarly, a surgeon requires 90 minutes for carrying out a recurrence...

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