Integral resource capacity planning for inpatient care services based on bed census predictions by hour

The design and operations of inpatient care facilities are typically largely historically shaped. A better match with the changing environment is often possible, and even inevitable due to the pressure on hospital budgets. Effectively organizing inpatient care requires simultaneous consideration of several interrelated planning issues. Also, coordination with upstream departments like the operating theatre and the emergency department is much-needed. We present a generic analytical approach to predict bed census on nursing wards by hour, as a function of the Master Surgical Schedule and arrival patterns of emergency patients. Along these predictions, insight is gained on the impact of strategic (ie, case mix, care unit size, care unit partitioning), tactical (ie, allocation of operating room time, misplacement rules), and operational decisions (ie, time of admission/discharge). The method is used in the Academic Medical Center Amsterdam as a decision-support tool in a complete redesign of the inpatient care operations.     

Zur Zerst?rung der organischen Substanz beim Nachweis von Metallgiften

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Detection of shear picosecond acoustic pulses by transient femtosecond polarimetry

Femtosecond transient polarimetry has been applied for the detection picosecond acoustic pulses generated in a thin film of zinc oxide (ZnO) deposited on an anisotropic zinc crystal surface. The measurements of the variations of the azimutal and the ellipticity angles describing the ultrafast variations of the state of polarisation (SOP) of the reflected light have been obtained. These polarimetric signals, interpreted as a SOP path on the Poincaré sphere, provide a sensitive method to detect acoustic echoes, particularly for shear acoustic pulses.