ORAHS2025
Abstract Submission

115. Operating room scheduling under limited turnover staff

Invited abstract in session MC-3: Staff scheduling, stream Sessions.

Monday, 11:00-12:30
Room: NTNU, Realfagbygget R9

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Gabriela Pinto Espinosa
SKEMA Centre for Analytics and Management Science, KU Leven FEB Research Centre for Operations Management, SKEMA Business School, KU Leuven
2. Aida Jebali
SKEMA Centre for Analytics and Management Science, SKEMA Business School
3. Erik Demeulemeester
KBI, KU Leuven
4. Angel Ruiz
Department of Operations and Decision Systems, Universite Laval

Abstract

Operating room (OR) scheduling is a widely studied problem because of the OR’s crucial role in patient care, its impact on healthcare institutions’ costs and revenue, and its complexity related to the presence of various sources of uncertainty, and the involvement of multiple physical and human resources. Among these resources, the staff responsible for turnover procedures, including patient transportation and OR cleaning and preparation between surgeries, is often unaccounted for. The occurrence of multiple turnover requests in short spans of time may lead to delays due to the unavailability of transportation or cleaning staff. These delays can propagate throughout the schedule, increasing the risk for overtime and cancellations. Our approach generates different schedules from both heuristic and mixed-integer programming-based methods. These schedules are then evaluated through discrete-event simulation over a set of experiments to compare their performance and to identify potential conflicts related to turnover requests, overtime and cancellations. The experiments include different settings and policies for managing the turnover staff, and multiple scenarios for elective surgery and recovery durations. Finally, we iteratively refine solutions to mitigate the occurrence of these conflicts.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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