In: Statistics and Probability
The number of patients needing admission each day to a hospital intensive care unit (ICU) has a Poisson distribution with a mean of 5.3. (a) Why might it be reasonable to expect that daily numbers of patients would have a Poisson distribution rather than any other distribution? (b) Assuming that patients only stay in the ICU for one day, what is the probability that an 8-bedded ICU will have to turn patients away on any particular day? (c) How many beds would the ICU require to ensure that patients, on average , were only turned away one day per year? (d) What are the practical implications of your analyses if a hospital wishes to achieve a high level of usage for its ICU beds?