Surgery Allocation and Scheduling

Operation rooms are significant cost drivers in hospitals. This is because of the expensive resources that are directly involved in surgery, and the indirect impact that operating room activities have on related activities and resources throughout the hospital. Surgery planning on different levels and time scales are thus central planning problems with strong interactions with other planning processes. An effective resolution of these problems is crucial to an efficient utilisation of hospital resources. As an example, consider the tactical planning problem of assigning blocks of operating time in operating rooms to groups of surgeons (See e.g. [1,11,4]). The result is a ”Master Surgery Schedule”, which will typically influence, or be influenced by, other resource planning processes that happen on a similar time scale. For example, this master schedule influences the variation of demand for surgeons and nurses (see e.g. [5] about physician scheduling and [2] about nurse rostering). In turn, at an operational level, the personnel rosters that are based on this demand will constrain the detailed surgery scheduling. This exemplifies the close connections between activity and resource planning processes at different time scales in a hospital.