The problem of scheduling surgery room with approach of maximizing preferences of hospital management and surgeons: A case study in Saadi Hospital of Isfahan

Abstract

In present age, medical system is changing and transforming in terms of position and these changes include increasing speed of patients and population aging and in its respect, increasing the elderly. Regarding technical barriers and limitations of human resources at hand in hospitals, major part of patients cannot be treated immediately and respectively, how longer time patients wait for treatment, their satisfaction about hospital services will decrease. In other hand, hospitals and especially state hospitals suffer a massive budget deficit. This limitation led to this matter that hospitals look for increasing medical service efficiency and decreasing cost of medical services. It should be pointed that the purpose of these hospitals is nothing but balancing and integrating budget. Based on obtained results, 70% of referrals to hospitals were aimed to surgery operations and more than 15% of wasted time in hospitals was related to surgery rooms and this instance clears importance of surgery room and its proper benefit more than before. Surgery room and generally surgery department has a special sensitivity and it is considered as the most vital section in hospitals. Therefore, the smallest deficiency or disregarding specified plan and pre-determined standards result in problems. Hence, hospital surgery room can be resembled with hospital motor because many hospital resources such as managers of surgery room planning, anesthesia specialist surgeons, nurses and others whom probably have different and sometimes conflicting goals are dependent on surgery room and eventually surgery room planning. The goal of this paper is the problem of surgery room scheduling with approach of maximizing surgeons and devoting surgery time based on hospital preferences and each of surgeons. Therefore, a model is provided to their scheduling in order to preferences and decreasing overtimes. In such a way that each surgeon operates in a surgery room specified for the same type of surgery regardless of surgery teams and based on predicted times for each surgery. This proposed model is solved in shape of a problem using obtained data from Saadi hospital of Isfahan and using Lingo software.