Hospital Scheduling

Reducing Wait Times in OR at a large Hospital

A project fromThe Centre for Operations Excellence Sauder School of Business Mats Gerschman Restricted distribution for MHA SPHA 542

Mini Case SPHA 542 University of British Columbia

Reducing Wait Times in OR at a large Hospital

Introduction

Within this Hospital there are 9 different operating rooms used by 25 different surgeons who perform a multitude of elective and emergency procedures. Currently, approximately 60% of the over 8000 surgeries completed each year are elective. In one year approximately 65% of patients who received elective surgery waited longer than the standards set by the hospital. George was recently hired to the administration and was asked to conduct a study in order to recommend ways to improve the situation. The goal of his project was stated as: • • • Increase patient throughput at this Hospital Decrease patient waiting times Uphold patient safety and quality of care

George was told that the focus of this project should be on the 9 operating rooms, their resource allocation, and their scheduling processes but the project should also examine all of the upstream and downstream elements of patient flow. These include the individual surgeons’ offices, the OR booking office, surgical day-care, the pre-admit clinic, the post-anesthetic recovery room, the intensive care unit, and all downstream patient beds.

Approach

George understood that the project would have an operating room focus. His approach was to first conduct on-site research to gain a solid understanding of patient flow throughout the hospital and then attempt to accurately model this system. This model would then be used to test various changes to resource allocation and scheduling routines in order to make recommendations on how to improve patient flow. George concluded that a variety of operations research methods would have to be used for the analysis of this Hospital. The anticipated methods are: • Process mapping of...