Trade-offs in operating room planning for electives and emergencies

The planning of the operating rooms (ORs) is a difficult process due to the different stakeholders involved. The real complexity, however, results from various sources of variability. This variability cannot be ignored since it greatly influences the trade-offs between the hospital costs and the patient waiting times. As a result, a need for policies guiding the OR manager in handling the trade-offs arises. Therefore, researchers have investigated different possibilities to incorporate non-elective patients in the schedule with the goal of maximizing both patient and hospital-related measures. The literature on OR planning, where both elective and non-elective patient categories are involved, shows various policies. Due to the differences in the research settings however, contradicting results on measures such as overtime and the patient waiting time are reported. Decisions on both operational policies as well as on capacity are required to assure timely access and efficiency, which are the two main drivers for the problem at hand. Trough discrete event simulation, we show the impact of capacity allocation decisions on various performance measures and include patient categories with different due times, the variability in the arrival process and rescheduling actions. For this, we use data of a large OR complex of a university hospital in Belgium.status: publishe