Empirical Analysis of Expected, Actual Waiting Time and Service Delivery: Evidence from Nigeria Hospitals.

Abstract

Time, they say is a crucial, important and most expensive resources and waits for no one. The challenges of patients waiting endlessly to get served in a hospital has attracted attention from different researchers. Being the major, critical and fundamental factor for patients’ satisfaction. Patient deserve to be able to predict the likely time he/she is likely to schedule for hospital visit especially for outpatient service. The research focus on determine the minimum and maximum time a patient may spend on the system using multi-channel queuing system (M/M/C) as this will help the patient to plan other schedules for the particular period of time. We collected data for two state hospital in different location through the personal observation approach. The data was collected for four working days (Monday to Friday) where the arrival and departure time for every patient was being monitored and average mean time method was adopted to determine the waiting time. Our findings reveal that hospital witness higher arrival rate on Monday being the first day of the week and also our result shows that expected minimum time for a patient is  35minutes 60 seconds while the expected maximum time the patient spent is 43minutes 20 seconds.