How to cut hospital waiting times

Queueing for essential medical attention at an emergency department (ED) department isn’t just stressful – it can be dangerous.

In 2017/18, £125 billion was spent on the National Health Service (NHS) in England, close to 10% of UK GDP. Yet the British Medical Association has said that 2.9 million people (or 15% of all hospital attendees) waited more than four hours and almost 6,000 people waited more than 12 hours at EDs around the UK in 2017. This is despite the fact that the NHS implemented a target, which requires EDs to admit or discharge 95% of patients within four hours. This target has not been met since 2015 and is currently suspended until April 2019.

Waiting is a fact of life in business and in an ED. But what can hospitals learn from companies? Take commuters waiting for takeaway coffees. The competition in the market would motivate coffee shops to reduce waiting times and prices at the same time, because most commuters would choose to visit a cheaper outlet with a shorter wait. Coffee shops with long wait times would eventually go out of business.

However, patients rarely have the option or willingness to shop around for healthcare services, consider wait times or mull over price (since insurance, private or national, pays the medical bills). So what’s the best, most cost-effective way to reduce waiting times in healthcare?

Dr Tolga Tezcan, London Business School (LBS) Associate Professor of Management Science and Operations, has devoted his career to the ‘science of waiting’. His latest paper, with LBS colleague Dr Nicos Savva, Associate Professor of Management Science and Operations, and Ozlem Yildiz, Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Darden School of Business, University of Virginia, explores why we wait so long at ED departments and offers a solution.