A simulation model for determining the optimal size of emergency teams on call in the operating room at night.

Background: Hospitals that perform emergency surgery during the night (e.g., from 11:00 pm to 7:30 am) face decisions on optimal operating room (OR) staffing.

Fewer intensive care unit refusals and a higher capacity utilization by using a cyclic surgical case schedule.

Purpose: Mounting health care costs force hospital managers to maximize utilization of scarce resources and simultaneously improve access to hospital services. This article assesses the benefits of a cyclic case scheduling approach that exploits a master surgical schedule (MSS). An MSS maximizes operating room (OR) capacity and simultaneously levels the outflow of patients toward the intensive care unit (ICU) to reduce surgery cancellation.

Closing emergency operating rooms improves efficiency.

Long waiting times for emergency operations increase a patient's risk of postoperative complications and morbidity. Reserving Operating Room (OR) capacity is a common technique to maximize the responsiveness of an OR in case of arrival of an emergency patient. This study determines the best way to reserve OR time for emergency surgery.

Improving operating room efficiency by applying bin-packing and portfolio techniques to surgical case scheduling.

Background: An operating room (OR) department has adopted an efficient business model and subsequently investigated how efficiency could be further improved. The aim of this study is to show the efficiency improvement of lowering organizational barriers and applying advanced mathematical techniques.

Methods: We applied advanced mathematical algorithms in combination with scenarios that model relaxation of various organizational barriers using prospectively collected data.

A norm utilisation for scarce hospital resources: evidence from operating rooms in a Dutch university hospital.

Background: Utilisation of operating rooms is high on the agenda of hospital managers and researchers. Many efforts in the area of maximising the utilisation have been focussed on finding the holy grail of 100% utilisation. The utilisation that can be realised, however, depends on the patient mix and the willingness to accept the risk of working in overtime.

Optimizing intensive care capacity using individual length-of-stay prediction models.

Introduction: Effective planning of elective surgical procedures requiring postoperative intensive care is important in preventing cancellations and empty intensive care unit (ICU) beds. To improve planning, we constructed, validated and tested three models designed to predict length of stay (LOS) in the ICU in individual patients.

Methods: Retrospective data were collected from 518 consecutive patients who underwent oesophagectomy with reconstruction for carcinoma between January 1997 and April 2005.