Optimal Design of a Vaccination Clinic: The Trade-Off Between Costs and QoS

Vaccination clinics are an essential tool to fight pandemics and can be set up temporarily in hospitals. Though typically hosted in permanent institutions, they need to be sized for effective use of resources (mainly space and staff) while maintaining an acceptable level of service, embodied by the waiting time for patients. In this paper, we employ an in-house developed simulation tool to size vaccination clinics and show how trade-offs can be achieved in the search for the optimal solution. We analyse two cases of low and high attendance and show that properly implementing batch processing can help reduce staffing levels (namely, the number of nurses) without sacrificing the level of service.