25 / 2017-07-22 11:40:58

Operating theatre planning taking into account nurses’ preferences of cooperation and the balancing of nurses’ technical skill training

operating theatre planning,multi-objective,technical skill training,mathematical model,linear programming,nurse rostering

This study aims at assigning elective surgical cases into a set of operating rooms by taking into account both the efficiency and effectiveness of the operating theatre. Besides the cost considered in most of the studies found in the literature, the nurses’ preferences of cooperation and the balancing of their technical skill training are also considered. The targeted problem is firstly formulated as a multi-objective mixed-integer mathematical programming. Afterwards, the non-linear constraints are transformed into a mixed-integer linear programming by linearizing the nonlinear constraints and all objectives are weighted and integrated into one general objective. The final mixed-integer linear programming is solved by CPLEX with data collected from a medium-size specialty hospital in China. Experimental results show that CPLEX can solve the model for the problems with up to five operating rooms though the execution time increases dramatically when the size of the problem becomes larger. The comparison between the optimal solution and the actual performance of the involved hospital shows that our solution can greatly improve the efficiency of the operating theatre for all considered objectives and thus can help the hospital managers to improve their work.