Covenant Hospital operates a main hospital and three outlying clinics in a medium-size city. All four locations perform similar outpatient services, and patients typically visit the location nearest them. The hospital has recently had more congestion—longer waiting lines—than it (or its patients) would like. As part of a study to learn the causes of these long lines and to suggest possible solutions, all locations have kept track of customer arrivals during 1-hour intervals for the past 10 weeks. All locations are open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. and on Saturday from 9 a.m. until noon. For each location, the hospital and clinics collected data that contains the number of customer arrivals during each hour of a 10-week period. The manager of Covenant has hired you to make some sense of these data. Specifically, your task is to present charts and/or tables that indicate how customer traffic into the hospital locations varies by day of week and hour of day. There is also interest in whether any daily or hourly patterns you observe are stable across weeks. Although you don’t have full information about the way the hospital currently runs its operations—you know only its customer arrival pattern and the fact that it is currently experiencing long lines—you are encouraged to append any suggestions for improving operations based on your analysis of the data.
For this Assignment, download and review the Covenant Hospital data file in this week’s resources. Reflect on what analyses might be required to address the manager’s request.
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Introduction:
As a medical professor responsible for creating college assignments for medical college students, I have been presented with a scenario where I need to analyze data related to customer traffic at Covenant Hospital. The hospital is facing issues with long waiting lines, and my task is to present charts and/or tables that indicate how customer traffic into the hospital locations varies by day of the week and hour of the day. I also need to assess if any daily or hourly patterns I observe are consistent over weeks.
Answer:
To address the manager’s request, I would begin by analyzing the data collected by Covenant Hospital. The data file contains the number of customer arrivals during each hour of a 10-week period at all four locations of the hospital.
Firstly, I would create a table that shows the average number of customer arrivals by day of the week and hour of the day. This would give me a clear picture of the traffic patterns at each location. I could use this data to identify peak hours and days when the customer footfall is high.
Next, I would create line graphs that illustrate customer traffic trends over the ten weeks of data collection. This would help me assess if the daily or hourly patterns observed are consistent over time.
Finally, based on my analysis, I may suggest some solutions to improve the hospital’s operations. For example, if I observe that there is a significant increase in customer footfall during certain days and hours of the week, I may recommend that additional staff be deployed during those times to reduce waiting times. Similarly, if I observe that certain clinics have higher customer traffic than others, I may suggest that the hospital redistributes resources to balance the workload across all locations.
Overall, my analysis of the Covenant Hospital data would help the manager understand the customer traffic patterns at the hospital and make informed decisions to improve the hospital’s operations.
