This paper provides practical guidelines for managers and health professionals looking to skill mix as a potential solution to health service delivery problems. These guidelines emphasise the need to evaluate the problem, and examine the context, before deciding if skill mix is the answer. The guidelines are provided in the knowledge that skill mix is rarely examined in a “pure” theoretical sen...

this paper deals with the product mix problem using the concept of theory of constraints (toc). theory of constraints is one of the most efficient approaches which have been applied to solve the product mix problem heuristically. although there are numerous heuristic and meta-heuristics to solve this problem, finding the optimal solution in a reasonable time is still a challenging issue. in thi...

Cardiothoracic surgery planning involves different resources such as operating theatre time, beds, IC beds and nursing staff. In the daily practice of the Thorax Centre case study setting, the planning focuses on optimal use of operating theatre time, though the performance of the Thorax Centre as a whole is often more limited by other resources. For operating theatres a master surgical schedul...

C spend millions of dollars on advertising to boost a brand’s image and simultaneously spend millions of dollars on promotion that many believe calls attention to price and erodes brand equity. We believe this paradoxical situation exists because both advertising and promotion are necessary to compete effectively in dynamic markets. Consequently, brand managers need to account for interactions ...

At the heart of the practice of primary care is the concept of a physician panel. A panel refers to the set of patients whose long term, holistic care the physician is responsible for. A physician’s appointment burden is determined by the size and composition of the panel. Size refers to the number of patients in the panel while composition refers to the case-mix, or the type of patients (older...

Penetration Testing is a methodology for assessing network security, by generating and executing possible attacks. Doing so automatically allows for regular and systematic testing without a prohibitive amount of human labor. A key question then is how to generate the attacks. This is naturally formulated as a planning problem. Previous work (Lucangeli et al. 2010) used classical planning and he...

At the heart of the practice of primary care is the concept of a physician panel. A panel refers to the set of patients for whose long term, holistic care the physician is responsible. A physician's appointment burden is determined by the size and composition of the panel. Size refers to the number of patients in the panel while composition refers to the case-mix, or the type of patients (older...