Weighted goal programming model for elective patients in surgical operating room block scheduling

Abstract

Operating rooms represent the significant department in hospital as it has a high usage rate and the demand for it is still ongoing. However, limited resources such as equipment and surgical specialities within hospital services made the scheduling of surgical operating room become a complicated task. A well-designed schedule should take into account resources utilization as well as the welfare of patients and surgical teams. A multi-objective optimization model is proposed to tackle some conflicting goals to produce an optimal master surgical schedule (MSS). In particular, this study aims to minimize the under utilization of operating rooms and surgical specialities, increasing the satisfaction of surgeons toward operating room and prioritized patients in health risk condition. The decision problem in this study is two-fold, first is the assignation of operating rooms and a fair distribution of operation time among surgical specialities for a week horizon. The second problem is to schedule elective surgeries into the assigned date and operating rooms. A weighted goal programming (WGP) model is developed where the weights of goals reflect the preference of decision maker toward the relative importance of each goal. Then, a case study is conducted to demonstrate four scenarios of different weights for each goal. The experiment results have shown when all conflicting goals are equally important to be considered, a longer computational time is needed to obtain a feasible solution and has a higher deviation objective value. Furthermore, achieving high utilization of operating rooms and surgical specialities as well as prioritized patients could not coexist. In short, it is necessary for hospital administration to balance each factor in surgical room scheduling while improving management efficiency. The proposed model could describe well the current management system situation and suggests applying in hospital practice. Future study is suggested to consider other factors such as bed resources and waiting time of patient in waiting list to improve operating room efficiency.