A large London teaching hospital has recently rebuilt the main hospital building and is reorganising its outpatient services, reducing the number of outpatient examination rooms from 90 to 55. They faced the problem of assigning rooms to clinical specialities, given that the number of clinics for each speciality varies from session to session of the week. Also, some examination rooms are more suited to some specialities than others. It was found that this problem could be expressed in relatively simple terms in integer programming terms. Further, the particular form of the problem meant that integer solutions occurred automatically if one merely solved the associated linear programming problem. In view of this, a very simple prototype planning tool could be constructed using the facilities of Excel, avoiding the need for specialist mathematical programming packages.
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