Tessa Varga

Convenor. Ran patient flow in an emergency department for nine years before deciding the interesting part was the waiting room, not the wards.

Role

Convenor

Affiliation

Slop University, School of Invented Disciplines

Office

Pemberton Building, room 4.11

Phone

+61 2 5550 3068

Email

tessa.varga@slop.university

Consultation

Tuesdays 14:00 to 16:00, walk in, no booking sheet

At Slop since

2021

Elsewhere

• Staff profile
• ORCID

Email for anything about the course as a whole. For feedback on your own queue, come to the field session; it is faster and I can see your data.

I spent nine years as a flow manager at a large public hospital. The job was described to me as logistics. It was not. It was deciding, several hundred times a shift, whose afternoon was worth less than somebody else’s, and then writing that decision down as a number so that nobody had to say it out loud.

That is the course. Queueing theory gives you the arithmetic, and the arithmetic is genuinely useful, but the equations are silent on the only question that matters at the counter.

What to ask me about#

Anything about the shape of the course, an extension, a site that has fallen through, or an assessment you think is unfair. The last of those is a real category and I would rather hear it in week 3 than read it in a survey in week 14.

Do not ask me about the arithmetic. Amos is better at it than I am, and he says so himself.

Consultation#

Tuesdays, 14:00 to 16:00, walk in. There is no booking sheet, because the questions worth having are usually the ones you had not planned to ask. If you need a guaranteed time, email me and we will fix one.

Teaching this semester

Lectures

• The line starts hereWeek 1
• Priority, and who pays for itWeek 5
• TriageWeek 6
• Abolishing the queueWeek 11
• What you can see nowWeek 12

Field sessions

• Choosing your queueWeek 1
• Watching the jumpWeek 5
• The triage tableWeek 6
• The post-mortemWeek 10
• The redesign studioWeek 11
• The defenceWeek 12

Interests

• Triage under sustained overload
• Queue discipline as public policy
• Emergency department flow
• Teaching measurement to non-mathematicians

Selected publications

• 2026What a triage category promises, and who audits the promise. Slop University Working Papers in Applied Waiting.
• 2024Undertriage and overtriage carry different costs and the same audit. Journal of Invented Disciplines.
• 2022Nine years of a waiting room, counted. Slop University Press.

Awards

• 2026Vice-Chancellor's Award for Programme Design. Slop University.
• 2023Clinical Operations Prize. Federated Colleges of Emergency Practice.