Introduction
We consider the problem of transport to and from hospitals and other major healthcare facilities for staff, visitors and non-emergency patients.
Healthcare facilities employ and serve a huge number of people every day. For example, UHS employs over 13,000 staff members, offers over 1,500 outpatient appointments per day, has over 1,300 beds and sees approximately 400 patients per day in its emergency department. This adds up to a huge number of people travelling to and from the hospital each day.
Increasing the proportion of patients, visitors and staff who arrive at a hospital by shared transport would reduce transport emissions significantly and could improve the hospital environment by reducing the traffic in and around the hospital grounds. Currently patients with mobility needs are brought to the hospital using non-emergency hospital transport. This incurs an expense to the healthcare authorities and can be slow and inefficient, with patients sometimes having to wait a long while at the hospital before and/or after their appointments.
2. Research Aim and Questions
In this project, we will investigate the use of shared transport open to all users, where staff, visitors and patients without mobility needs pay to use the transport and those with mobility needs still get the service for free. The research will investigate several key questions.
RQ1: How should the journeys on the service be optimised to take account of passenger constraints and appointment times?
RQ2: How should the service be priced to make it attractive to hospital users?
RQ3: At what scale of usage does the shared transport become cost neutral for the healthcare authority?
Other research questions may become apparent during the first year of the research and in discussions with stakeholders.
The project will involve designing and coding algorithms for optimal routing and scheduling and some stochastic optimisation for optimal pricing. Evaluation of methods will be done via simulation and this will also need to be coded by the student. We anticipate working with one or more hospital authorities and the student will also need to have excellent communication skills to be able to discuss their ideas and results with non-experts and glean information about existing systems from hospital representatives.