Question a: What are the problems that you can find from the case study?

The problem with Shouldice is that they have to perform too many operations on average five
days a week, the patient stays too long resulting in a shortage of beds. Shouldice's medical
facilities include five operating rooms, one patient recovery room, one laboratory and six
examination rooms. Shouldice performs 150 operations per week on average, and patients are
generally hospitalized for three days. Although the operation is only performed five days a week,
the rest of the hospital continues to operate to take care of recovered patients.

Case Study Question b:

What were the solutions provided (if any)?
The solution provided is adding one more day of operations (Saturday) to the existing
five-day schedule, which would increase capacity by 20 percent or add another floor of
rooms to the hospital, increasing the number of beds by 50 percent. This would require
more aggressive scheduling of the operating rooms. The administrator of the hospital,
however, is concerned about maintaining control over the quality of the service
delivered. However, further expansion of capacity might make it hard to maintain the
same kind of working relationships and attitudes. The concern of control over quality
may be affected since the capacity has increased.

Q3 What are your recommendations?

The recommendation to solve this problem is to expand the capacity of the hospital and hire
more doctors and staff to meet a large number of unmet needs. This is because it may be difficult
to maintain the same working relationship and attitude if only expanding the hospital without
hiring more doctors and staff. Expansion means that the workload of doctors and staff will
increase. Therefore, the hospital can hire more doctors and staff and schedule the working hours
reasonably. By doing so, this can solve the problem of insufficient capacity as well as the
problem after the capacity expansion.
Question d: Any evidence of real company applying the solution that you have suggested?

The example I'm giving here is a hospital in the Klang Valley that was already overloaded during
the pandemic. All 23 wards at a designated Covid-19 hospital in the Klang Valley are operating
at over capacity. They are forced to repurpose a ward with 30 to 40 beds to provide ICU beds.
Because of the volume of patients, patients can't expect full ICU care, but at least doctors can
intubate and monitor patients there.

Hence, they have adopted the solution mentioned in question 3, which is to expand the capacity
of the hospital, and that hospital in Klang Valley is currently operating at an increased capacity
of about 20 beds, which allows them to treat more patients.