OBJECTIVES: Managing capacity attendance of a healthcare service is crucial to guarantee its quality and the patient safety. This study proposed a discrete-event simulation model to investigate the capacity of a clinical pharmacy department from a public-academic hospital.

METHODS: The service process was mapped, and the model’s operations programmed accordingly. Data was collected within the institution, and results verified. The patient's prescription was defined as the entry entity. Instead of their clinical risk, inpatients are classified according to process criteria on 6 types, which determines whether the inpatient will account with a close follow up review of a pharmacist.

RESULTS: Results indicate that it is possible to process up to 761 prescriptions with a mean resource utilization of 82.6%. Proving that the department has enough capacity to provide its service. However, it does not guarantee that every inpatient account with a regular follow up by a pharmacist as recommended by studies to offer a higher level of service. On a simulation scenario where every inpatient account with a regular follow up review currently done manually capacity proved not to be sufficient.

CONCLUSIONS: An electronic inpatient prioritization tool based on clinical risk was presented as a possible solution to cope with close follow up versus capacity challenge. Another simulation scenario experiment was developed to measure what would be the productivity gains. Results indicated that will be possible to increase close follow up service provision by 49%.