NHS RPYSOC 2024 Conference: Unleashing the power of pathway simulation

Friday 22nd November 2024

Discrete Event Simulation (DES) is a powerful tool for modelling queuing problems, allowing complex questions about pathways and resourcing to be explored before making costly and potentially risky changes to health services.

However, there are barriers to its adoption: dedicated commercial software is prohibitively expensive, while free code-based open-source options are powerful and flexible but can be difficult to get started with and often lack the ability to clearly and engagingly visualise the model’s inner workings for stakeholders.

This talk provides a brief introduction to DES before covering a range of efforts that are underway within our team to overcome these problems and make DES an accessible modelling approachfor everyone working in healthcare:

• building a repository of adaptable models for a variety of common pathways in healthcare;
• writing a free ebook in Quarto to give people a clear way to learn;
• building interactive tools to teach the underlying concepts to non-technical audiences;
• and creating a simple yet flexible visualisation package to generate animations showing the flow of entities within the simulated system, helping to make the models more understandable.

While the work primarily revolves around the SimPy package in Python, several elements have potential to be adapted for use with Python’s ciw package or R’s simmer package.

With the first version of the book available, several example models created, and the visualisation package due to be released in late 2024, now is a great time to start exploring the world of pathway simulation!

Slides

Slide Code

View the repository for the slides at github.com/Bergam0t/nhsr_conf_2024_pres_des