The public really does need an education on how queues work. I’m sitting here in the A&E waiting area (ER for readers in the US) having made the mistake of not looking too ill (and so I’ve been told it’s a 3 hour wait today). More on my wait in another post, but the behaviour of others in the “queue” is what interests me.

Of course it does not look like a queue in a typical simulation model. There is just a large waiting area with about 100 seats, currently around 50% occupancy. However there is no “head” or “tail” to this queue, it does not “move”, only the “system” knows where people are in the queue and, in any case, there are actually multiple queues (and I’m in the “walked in, not bleeding, no chest pains, so can wait all day” queue).

All this means that people in the queue lack information about their “progress” towards the head of the queue (and most of them don’t realise there are multiple queue). A lot of staff time is being used dealing with questions about how much longer people will need to wait and trying to explain why the small boy seems to have been wheeled into see the doctor after only 5 minutes when the lady next to me has waited an hour so far. The patients (or perhaps more so their relatives) are quite frustrated by what they perceive as a poorly organised and unfair system, whereas to me it all looks quite reasonablely organised. But that’s because I think about queue for my work just about every day.

If the public had a way to play with queues (to understand the impact of arrival rates, queue segregation, the negative feedback implications of temporary bottlenecks etc) they would get less frustrated and waste less hospital administrator time with their repeated questions! Maybe we need to bundle some free simulation models with every new PC?
Mark