Evaluating Staffing Levels in Milk Lab Using Discrete Event Simulation

This study uses discrete event simulation (DES) to evaluate various staffing levels at a milk lab in an academic medical center. The studied milk lab operates 10 hours a day and 7 days a week and processes on average 45 orders from a 64-bed Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). We categorized the orders into simple and complex orders. The ranges for percentages of simple and complex orders were obtained by reviewing the historical data of orders at the milk lab. A DES model was then built to evaluate the number of required technicians at the milk lab by varying the number of orders as well as the percentage of complex orders. The performance measures studied in our simulation model were the makespan and utilization of the milk lab technicians. Based on the results, three technicians is a reasonable level of staffing conditional on timely start of the orders.