Hospital "self-prophylaxis": strategies for efficient protection of the workforce in the face of infectious disease threats.

Hospital preparedness for nosocomial or community-wide outbreaks of communicable disease includes the capability for rapid, self-reliant administration of prophylaxis to its workforce, with the goal of minimal disruption of patient care, here called hospital "self-prophylaxis." We created a new discrete-event simulation model of a hypothetical hospital wing to compare the operational charateristics of standard single-line, "first-come, first-served" dispensing clinics with those of 2 staff management strategies that can dramatically reduce staff waiting time while centralizing dispensing around existing pharmacy-distribution points.