Operating theatre scheduling with patient recovery in both operating rooms and recovery beds

Abstract

. Operating theatre scheduling with patient recovery in both operating rooms and recovery beds. Computers and Industrial Engineering, Elsevier, 2010, 58 (5) Operating theatre scheduling with patient recovery in both operating rooms and recovery bedsAbstract : This paper investigates the impact of allowing patient recovery in the operating room when no recovery bed is available. Three types of identical resources are considered : transporters, operating rooms and recovery beds. A fixed number of patients must be planned over a term horizon, usually one or two weeks. The surgery process is modelled as follows : each patient is transported from the ward to the operating theatre. Then the patient visits an operating room for surgery operation and is transferred to the recovery room. If no recovery bed is available, the patient wakes up in the operating room until a bed becomes available. The operating room needs to be cleaned after the patient's departure, before starting another operation. Finally, the patient is transported back to the ward after his recovery. We consider several criteria based on patients' completion times. We propose a Lagrangian relaxation-based method to solve this operating theatre scheduling problem. The efficiency of this method is then validated by numerical experiments. A comprehensive numerical experiment is then performed to quantify the benefit of allowing patient recovery in operating rooms. We show that the benefit is high when the workload of the recovery beds is high.

Modeling the critical care pathway for cardiothoracic surgery

“…Augusto et al [9] took a different approach in tackling hospital operation efficiency. The study challenges the rule that no patients should be allowed in the operating room if no recovery beds are available after the operation.…”

Integrated decision making in healthcare : an operations research and management science perspective

“…Although surgical case scheduling can be done integrally in one step [13,142,143,177,336,398,422,455], it is often decomposed in several steps. In the latter case, first, the planned length of a surgical case is decided.…”

“…For example, without coordination with the ICU, a scheduled case may be rejected on its day of surgery due to a full ICU [398]. The contributions [13,81,102,177,256,337,366,398,433] do incorporate other care services, such as the patient wards and ICUs.…”

“…The perioperative stage involves surgery in the operating room, and the postoperative stage involves recovery at a recovery ward [224]. Recovery can also take place in the operating room when a recovery bed is not immediately available [13]. Surgical patients requiring a bed are admitted to a (inpatient or outpatient) medical care unit before the start of the surgical process, where they return after the surgical process [274].…”

“…Efficient patient routes are designed with the objective to increase resource utilization [340]. Methods: computer simulation [340], heuristics [13], mathematical programming [13,398], literature review [224,351].…”