Discrete Event Simulation support for NHS Scotland 

Funded by the Scottish Government since 2014 to support Scotland’s public health service in its quest to improve patient experiences while reducing costs. Work with Glasgow Royal Infirmary orthopaedics department utilised Discrete Event Simulation (DES) for cost comparison of two fracture pathways using an activity based costing method.

Since then DES has been further utilised within secondary care to model hospital processes and patient pathways as a route to understanding and improving these. Key to this is understanding hospital pathways and processes, assessing and reducing artificial variability, modelling activities and flows and exploring scenarios for improvement.

Working closely with the NHS and Scottish Government we continue to train and support NHS Managers, clinicians and analysts to develop their DES capability for process understanding and improvement.



We're one of 10universities on the NATCOR executive which develops and delivers doctoral training for research students in Operational Research across the UK