On the battlefield they have a quick look at the casualties, and priorities the most urgent ones. The less urgent ones have to wait, which is not great for them, but it’s best for everyone overall.
In many supermarkets they have a queue for “10 items or less” which is not great if you have 11 items, but it does mean that all the easy customers get served really quickly, without having to wait behind the person that has 87 items.
I wish they did this at AIRPORTS and HOSPITALS. In fact, this article is to SUGGEST that we do the same at both of those places.
Not to have a fast track for the easy ones (in the UK healthcare systems that’s called “going private” and requires money, and that’s a whole other subject, not for this article). No, what I want to suggest is that the few difficult/slow cases are taken out and dealt with separately so that the rest can be served quickly. Take the “blockers” out. Imagine if most people in the supermarket had 3 or 4 items but occasionally you got someone with 87, you wouldn’t want to be in the queue of people waiting behind THAT person. And yet that’s exactly what happens in airports and hospitals.
At airports maybe one person in ten has something wrong with their passport, or they haven’t booked the correct flight, or their bag is overweight and they have to open it up, while the whole rest of the queue waits.
If you have four desks then it doesn’t take long before all four have a difficult person blocking it, while everyone waits.
Similarly in hospitals there are people who are genuinely ill or in pain, and then there are people who are drunk / on drugs / have been in a fight. On Friday nights these form perhaps half of everyone there. So you have to queue up behind them, which feels annoying and unfair, since they are to an extent self-inflicted. Here in Poole where I live we have a significant problem with homeless alcoholics clogging up A&E, and causing trouble while they are there – and while they certainly need help, A&E probably isn’t the best way to help them. And once all four doctors have got a difficult drugged-up (possibly violent) person occupying them, everything stops,
So at the moment the queues at airports and hospitals are like this: the boxes a the top are the doctors’ rooms or the airport serving desks, and the queue is mostly quick people with the occasional high-maintenance blocker in the queue:
Let’s say that one person in ten takes five minutes rather than one to check in at the airport, and they are randomly situated in the queues. (I have numbered the left hand queue with these times). Within a short time they are all at the front, blocking that queue (and I’ve seen queues blocked for 20 minutes by people at the airport checkin, …also at car hire checkin). So it becomes this:
How great it would be if we could have THIS instead:
So there would the three queues that can move really fast and efficiently, for people who have the right paperwork and have weighed their bags – and a short but slow queue for the difficult cases. Perhaps with more highly trained staff serving. But mainly just to take the blockers out of the main system.
When a blocker comes to the front of the fast queues, they would be sent to join the “Special” queue:
Not only would be queues be much faster for people who are following the rules, but there would also be an incentive to get your act together before you arrive at checkin. At the moment there isn’t – you reach the front and get served just as quickly (or slowly) as everyone else, and once you get there why should you care about holding the others up while you get sorted out.
In the hospital example, people who are drunk or on drugs would be sent to a separate unit, probably an indestructible one with wipe-down surfaces, to queue with the others in that state, rather than ruining it for the genuine cases. This special unit might well be more suitable for them as well. The systems and treatments could be quite different – as required.
In terms of the numbers, going back to the check-in example, it might look like this:
Here we see some of 40 people arriving at check-in, of whom one in ten (that’s 4 people) need 5 minutes while the others all need 1. So if there are four serving desks (or doctors) then the queue will on average contain nine quick ones and one slow one – 9 + 5 = 14 minutes. Let’s say we get this many people every quarter of an hour.
(by the way I wish A&E OR the airport check in was anywhere near as fast as that, but this is a simplified and shortened example). Multiply the numbers of people by ten if you’d rather.
So imagine that in order to cope with the 14 minutes of work arriving every quarter of an hour we have a person at the desk who can do that work in any given 15 minutes, so they are just keeping up. The maths says that, due to randomness of arrival rate, the average queue will be U/(1-U) where U is the utilisation, which is 14/15 = 93%. So the queue will be 93/7 = 13 which is going to take about 20 minutes.
If we move to the triage system where blockers are moved to a “special” queue, then we have this:
In the “normal” queues we have 9 minutes of work to be done in 15, which is U of 9/15 = 60%, so the queue will be 60/40 = less than 2, which means basically almost immediate service without having to wait.
In the Special queue, assuming you only have one (incredibly patient) person dealing with that one, there is 20 minutes of work to be done in 15, so that queue will get longer, until all the difficult cases have been done. But that’s up to them – they have to an extent chosen that queue. Worst case if they all arrived at once and there are ten of them, the back line will have to wait for the nine in front to be dealt with (while cursing people who don’t book the right flight or weigh their suitcases) which is 9×5 = 45 minutes.
- Efficient processing of people who have followed the system,
- reward for doing things right,
- and an incentive to NOT be a blocker.
And in the hospital the old folks who have fallen over, or the kids who have got a saucepan stuck on their heads, can be seen straight away, in a safe and civilised environment, while the drunks who have got into a fight can wait in a long queue somewhere else.
I’m all in favour of that!
