Question

A hospital's biomedical repair shop uses a 4-week periodic system to maintain the inventory on the blood pressure cuff repair parts. They use an average 40 adult arm cuffs with a standard deviation of 6 cuffs every four weeks. Cuffs aren't the most critical item they carry, but the manager would like to avoid the embarrassment of a stockout at least 95% (Z factor 1.65) of the time. What should their restocking level be?

Answer 1

The restocking level should be 50 cuffs.

Explanation:

Let X = restocking level of blood pressure cuff repair parts.

The mean number of adult arm cuffs used is, μ = 40.

And the standard deviation is, σ = 6.

It is provided that manager would like to avoid the embarrassment of a stock-out at least 95% of the time.

Assume that the random variable X follows a Normal distribution.

Then, from the provided data is can be said that:

P (X < x) = 0.95

⇒ P (Z < z) = 0.95

The value of z for the above probability is:

z = 1.65.

Compute the value of X as follows:

`X=\mu+z\ \sigma`

`=40+(1.65* 6)\\=40+9.9\\=49.9\\\approx 50`

Thus, the restocking level should be 50 cuffs.