Generic Waiting Lists for Routine Spinal Surgery

Waiting lists for surgery.

© 2002 Canadian Medical Association S waiting lists are seen by many as epitomizing the shortcomings of our public health care system. Yet, they can also be interpreted as being the result of a societal compromise between the founders’ promise of universal access to care and the reality of currently committed resources. Regardless of one’s perception, the debate about the “appropriate length” o...

Managing waiting lists for cardiac surgery.

Waiting lists and elective surgery: ordering the queue.

In the Australian public health system, access to elective surgery is rationed through the use of waiting lists in which patients are assigned to broad urgency categories. Surgeons are principally responsible for referring patients to waiting lists, deciding on the appropriate urgency category, and selecting patients from the waiting list to receive surgery. There are few agreed-upon criteria t...

Influencing Waiting Lists

In many settings, randomly arriving objects are offered successively to agents according to their fixed order in a waiting list. Though it is costly to wait, an agent may prefer to decline an offered object in order to wait for a better one (e.g. as in perhaps the most significant of such environments, the assignment of donor organs to queued patients). We consider the welfare consequences of i...

Admissions from surgical waiting lists.

Many factors tend to reduce the efficiency of bed utilization in general hospitals. A numerically small, but clinically well-recognized, cause of wastage arises from the failure of waiting list patients to attend for admission when offered beds. The relative severity of the problem varies between clinical specialties, according to the proportions of total admissions accounted for by waiting lis...