Operating Room Scheduling during COVID-19

Abstract

During the first COVID-19 wave in the Netherlands, hospitals had to scale down their elective care all over the hospital to make room for COVID-19 patients. Even the Operating Room (OR) reduced their surgeries to acute care. It is, however, hard to define how much the OR should downscale. Also, there are no national plans on how hospitals should downscale and prioritize their waiting lists. On top of that, the COVID-19 situation can change suddenly, leaving only a little time to change the OR schedule. Making a new OR schedule with only a little time and lots of additional COVID-19 related variables can be challenging. A planning model can help the planning department with making an OR planning. To find out what planning would work best for the Reinier de Graaf hospital, multiple things are done: the OR planning during the first COVID-19 wave is analyzed with the help of data analysis and interviews, existing OR planning models were analyzed, feasibility was checked by interviews, and a proof of concept was made. Using an OR planning model can be helpful for the RdGG to assist their planning process. The model can help plan patients based on their priority while keeping the outflow below the threshold and leveled, and while keeping a high utilization of the OR. This will give the planning staff more time to plan patients further ahead and give them a better overview of how many ORs to open if the maximum outflow is reached, and on the usage of appliances.