Queing Theory, a Tool for Polio Eradication in Nigeria

To curb the spread of contagious diseases and the recent polio outbreak in Nigeria, health departments must set up and operate clinics to dispense medications or vaccines. Residents arrive according to an external (not necessarily Poisson) Arrival process to the clinic. When a resident arrives, he goes to the first workstation, based on his or her information, the resident moves from one workstation to another in the clinic. The queuing network is decomposed by estimating the performance of each workstation using a combination of exact and approximate models. A key contribution of this research is to introduce approximations for workstations with batch arrivals and multiple parallel servers, for workstations with batch service processes and multiple parallel servers, and for self service workstations. We validated the models for likely scenarios using data collected from one of the states vaccination clinics in the country during the vaccination exercises.