leonce12/USIU-Africa-HealthCare-Queue-Management-System

# USIU-Africa Health Centre — Queue Desk A web-based queue management system built for the USIU-Africa Health Centre, replacing the manual, in-person queueing process with digital tickets, live wait-time tracking, and a real-time dashboard for clinic staff. Built as a mid-term project for APT 3065-UA, Summer 2026, USIU-Africa. ## The problem Students visiting the Health Centre currently wait in a physical line with no visibility into their position or expected wait time, which leads to overcrowding during peak hours and adds administrative load for clinic staff who have to track and call patients manually. This project addresses that gap: students join a queue remotely and watch their position update live, while staff manage the flow of patients across departments from a single dashboard. ## How it works A student signs in with their university email, selects the department they need, and receives a digital ticket showing their position in line and an estimated wait time. They can track this from anywhere without standing at the reception desk. On the other side, clinic staff see every department's queue update live, call the next student forward, and assign them to one of that department's available consultation rooms. Both views refresh automatically every few seconds, so nobody needs to manually reload the page to see what's changed. Access is restricted at the server level to university email addresses ending in `@usiu.ac.ke`, and passwords are salted and hashed rather than stored as plain text. Each department has its own fixed set of consultation rooms, and the system prevents two students from ever being assigned to the same room at the same time. The whole system runs without a database. Data is kept in a simple JSON file on disk, which was a deliberate choice for a project built by a small student team on a fixed semester timeline: it means anyone can clone the project and have it running in minutes, with nothing extra to install or configure. ## B …