OPERATING ROOM SCHEDULING UNDER LIMITED ICU BEDS

Abstract

Many patients in public hospitals around the world have to wait for a long time for their operations due to Operating Room (OR) and/or downstream resources scarceness. Moreover, increasing the number of ORs or related resources is difficult because of expensive OR costs and limited budget in hospitals. From our knowledge, a well OR schedule can raise number of patient throughputs and maximize the OR utilization so, we developed a binary programming model which aims to maximize the number of patients that can be included in the OR schedule under the limited number of ICU beds. Our OR schedule specifies which patient will be operated, OR, day, and period. Then, ten instance sets were generated from real data to test the model and solved by an optimization software. The results showed that, for small and medium instances, our model can guarantee the optimal solutions under 3-hours limited time, while the large instances cannot. However, there are small gap percentages for non-optimal solutions.