Design, modelling, evaluation, and optimisation of intensive care unit network in Hong Kong: abridged secondary publication

We built a framework involving the design, evaluation, and optimisation of intensive care unit (ICU) networks in Hong Kong, particularly during pandemics and mass casualty events.
The model for the Hong Kong ICU network enables central management and sharing of ICU beds to improve quality of service metrics without incurring additional expenditure on new resources.
We analysed real data from hospitals in the New Territories Northeast cluster and identified appropriate arrival process and length of service distributions for different types of patients (internal emergency, external emergency, and elective).
We applied the International Ethics Standards for Sustainability Assurance framework to evaluate the rejection or deferral rate for each type of patients, with reasonable accuracy.
We proposed a heuristic algorithm based on particle swarm optimisation to determine the optimal set of relevant network parameters, and then combined it with the International Ethics Standards for Sustainability Assurance method for evaluating each setting. The combination can effectively reduce computation time by up to two orders of magnitude while obtaining the same optimal solution. © 2026 Hong Kong Academy of Medicine.