Health Care Planning – a case study of a surgery clinic

This paper reports on a case study of the planning system of a surgery clinic at a hospital in western Sweden. The main objective was to explore in what way an improved design of the planning and control system could contribute to proper resource utilization and to what extent the required service level could be achieved for all patients. The study uncovered a great deal of improvement potential in the surgery planning process. The planning process proved to be “unbalanced”, implying that too little attention was paid to the upper planning levels (SOP and master planning), and that most effort was put into priority planning on the detailed level. Clear deficiencies were also found in the integration between the planning levels. Further, planning had almost a pure resource perspective, not focusing on the anticipated required demand or “order stock”. Important tools to support the decision processes were lacking