We present an analysis of one years' worth of empirical data on the arrival and discharge times at a UK Accident and Emergency (A&E) department. We find that discharges rates vary slightly with the workload and that the distribution of the length of stay has a fat tail. A sand pile model is considered to show that the A&E department is a self-organised system, where the department stuff manage their work time to cope with the department's occupancy. We use in our model a variable input space to mimic the queuing discipline related to different cases of accidents found in the department. The input space is defined by two parameters; its size sxs and the distance m from two nearest edges. We show for the length of stay distribution the transition from power law to Poissonian like curve while s or m are increased from s=1 and m=0.

• Legal notice:
  

  Copyright (c) Pielaszek Research, all rights reserved.
  The above materials, including auxiliary resources, are subject to Publisher's copyright and the Author(s) intellectual rights. Without limiting Author(s) rights under respective Copyright Transfer Agreement, no part of the above documents may be reproduced without the express written permission of Pielaszek Research, the Publisher. Express permission from the Author(s) is required to use the above materials for academic purposes, such as lectures or scientific presentations.
  In every case, proper references including Author(s) name(s) and URL of this webpage: https://science24.com/paper/14744 must be provided.