Constructing schedules for the Operation Room Department while considering the influence on the Intensive Care Unit

The Operation Room (OR) and the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) are two departments at the hospital that interact with each other. Some patients require post-operative care at the ICU and their surgi- cal operations can only be performed if there is capacity available at the ICU. This thesis proposes a scheduling algorithm which incorporates the ICU in constructing an OR schedule. Two objectives are used which either level the occupation of the ICU or the ow of patients from the OR to the ICU. Data of the Erasmus MC is used to construct OR schedules for this hospital. In this hospital currently the schedule of the OR is constructed without considering the interaction between the OR and the ICU. The constructed schedules are compared with the current OR schedule and show a more smooth occupation of the ICU and less variance in the ow of patients from the OR to the ICU. To analyze the interaction between the OR and the ICU in more detail, the ICU is modeled as a queueing model. Di_erent types of patients require admission to the ICU, for example patients from the OR, from the wards of the hospital or from the emergency department. Patients from scheduled surgical operations are one of these types. Their arrival at the ICU is determined by the OR schedule. With a simulation model the inuence of the new OR schedules on the ICU is analyzed. The performance of the ICU is compared to the performance under other OR schedules. The constructed OR schedules result in a better performance on the ICU than a random schedule. The results show an increase in performance if the ow of patients from the OR to the ICU is more levelled. However, in general the di_erences in performance between the di_ent OR schedules are small. The conclusion therefore is that there is not much room for improvement, although the ICU performance sligthly increases under OR schedules with a more smooth ow of patients from the OR to the ICU. The ICU performance is thus not very sensitive to the OR schedule. Apart from levelling the ow of patients from the OR to the ICU, we can thus focus on other criteria while constructing the OR schedule, such as optimal use of the OR capacity.