Determinants and Management of Patient Waiting Time in the General Outpatient Department in Kibabii University Health Clinic, Kenya
Sevu Muen
Department of Mathematics, Kibabii University, Box 1699-50200, Bungoma, Kenya.
Samson W. Wanyonyi *
Department of Mathematics, University of Eldoret, Box 1125-30100 Eldoret, Kenya.
Davis Mwenda Marangu
Department of Mathematics, Kibabii University, Box 1699-50200, Bungoma, Kenya.
Obare D. Mong’are
Department of Physical Science, Chuka University, Box 109-60400 Chuka, Kenya.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to determine the time that a patient can spend waiting for service in Kibabii University Healthcare Clinic in Bungoma County (Kenya). The main objective was to provide necessary information to service facility managers, stakeholders, hospital staffs and other related institutions with the knowledge to improve the queuing system or to curb long waiting time of patients seeking services which can cause deterioration of the disease and sudden demise. This project also aims at providing suggestions to various factors identified to be the causes of long waiting time in the outpatient department at Kibabii University healthcare to help the smooth running of the clinic. The ODK tool was used in data collection procedure to capture the opinions of the respondents. The results from the ODK Tool was exported to XLS which is an export feature of data to excel, later data was exported to SPSS for analysis from excel.
Keywords: Average patient treatment, Markov Chain, Outpatient Department (OPD) and Queuing Models