Dr. Kathy Kotiadis, Dr. Antuela Tako, Dr. Christos Vasilakis

This project is about developing a conceptual modelling tool that can be used to aid the development of discrete event simulation models in health care taking a participative approach. This website outlines the PartiSim approach, provides an account of the day-to-day progress and presentations. The project outputs, which consist of a framework and tools will be uploaded on the website soon.

Development of a conceptual modelling tool*

A large number of healthcare models have been created in the literature over the last 30 years, but only a few of these have been reported as successful or have had an impact on policy making. This could be attributed to the lack of user participation in conceptual modelling. Conceptual modelling is believed to be the least understood phase in a simulation study and there is a clear need to develop approaches to assist in this phase. So far there are no formal approaches to assist the modeller in the stage of understanding the problem situation and setting out the simulation study objectives. This project takes a participative approach and aims to develop a tool that can be used by any group of health care stakeholders in determining their conceptual model for a simulation study with some assistance from a modeller. We believe that Problem Structuring Methods could be modified to suit this need.

We aim to adapt Checkland’s four main activities model of SSM and link this with the development of conceptual models as part of facilitated workshops with health care professionals and stakeholders. More specifically:

• At a first stage, we will use SSM’s first main activity to find out about the situation culturally and politically for specific healthcare problems. We are aiming to explore the use of oval mapping and other diagramming approaches for use during these workshops.
•  We will modify and enhance the transformation process, by using CATWOE, root definitions and the system monitoring activities (the three Es), which are part of the SSM technique for the development of a purposeful activity model, to map on and produce the necessary information for developing a  conceptual model.
• The resulting conceptual models will be used to produce simulation models, the findings of which will be presented to healthcare stakeholders at a later stage. Workshops will be held to discuss the findings and to reflect on the implementation of the outcomes.
• As a result, we will develop a guide for the framework and tool used.

References

Checkland P. (1999). Soft systems methodology: a 30-year retrospective, Wiley, Chichester.

Kotiadis K. (2006) Extracting a conceptual model for a complex integrated system in health care. Proceedings of the 3^rd Simulation workshop. In: Garnett J., Brailsford S., Robinson S., Taylor S. (eds) Proceedings of the OR Society’s Two-Day Workshop (SW06), Leamington Spa, UK: 235-245. 

Lehaney B and Hlupic V (1995). Simulation modelling for resource allocation and planning in the health sector. J Roy Soc Healt115: 382–385.

Lowery J.C (1994) Barriers to implementing simulation in health care. In: Tew J.D, Mannivannan S, Sadowski D.A. and Seila A.F. (eds) Proceedings of the 1994 Winter Simulation Conference, December 11-14, 1994, Lake Buena Vista, FL, USA. ACM, 868-875

Robinson S. (2004). Simulation, The practice of Model Development and Use, John Wiley and Sons, Chichester.

*This project is supported by the EPRSC grant EP/E045871/1.