Improving probability distributions for resource levels from master surgery tactical plans for emergency and elective patients

Abstract

Efficiency and patient satisfaction are two of the most important factors for a hospital; in order to be competitive these two factors have to be improved. Tactical admission plans are focused on increasing efficiency, but in this paper we try to also associate patient satisfaction with the tactical plan. To this respect, we present a procedure to calculate exact waiting time distributions and another procedure to compute the exact level of resources usage. Then we explore two different methods to improve tactical plans to avoid overuse of IC beds, we consider this as the most critical resource: cancellation of emergency patients operations and cancellation of elective patients operations. Data from a Dutch cardiothoracic surgery center is used to base our case study on and shows that the cancelation of operation leads to an increase of hospital efficiency but it can have some negative effects in the patient satisfaction.