The COVID-19 pandemic has placed severe demands on healthcare facilities across the world,
and in several countries, makeshift COVID-19 centres have been operationalised to handle
patient overflow. In developing countries such as India, the public healthcare system (PHS)
is organised as a hierarchical network with patient flows from ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has placed severe demands on healthcare facilities across the world,
and in several countries, makeshift COVID-19 centres have been operationalised to handle
patient overflow. In developing countries such as India, the public healthcare system (PHS)
is organised as a hierarchical network with patient flows from lower-tier primary health
centres (PHC) to mid-tier community health centres (CHC) and downstream to district
hospitals (DH). In this study, we demonstrate how a network-based modelling and simulation
approach utilising generic modelling principles can (a) quantify the extent to which the
existing facilities in the PHS can effectively cope with the forecasted COVID-19 caseload;
and (b) inform decisions on capacity at makeshift COVID-19 Care Centres (CCC) to handle
patient overflows. We apply the approach to an empirical study of a local PHS comprising
ten PHCs, three CHCs, one DH and one makeshift CCC. Our work demonstrates how the
generic modelling approach finds extensive use in the development of simulations of multitier facility networks that may contain multiple instances of generic simulation models of
facilities at each network tier. Further, our work demonstrates how multi-tier healthcare
facility network simulations can be leveraged for capacity planning in health crises.