Analysis of uncertainty in the surgical department: durations, requests and cancellations.

Conclusions The analysis presented herein can be used to ensure that assumptions surrounding planning and scheduling in the surgical department are valid. Understanding the stochasticity in the surgical department may result in the implementation of more realistic decision models.What is known about the topic? Many surgical departments rely on crude estimates and general intuition to predict surgical duration, surgical requests (both elective and non-elective) and cancellations.What does this paper add? This paper describes how statistical analysis can be performed to validate common assumptions surrounding surgical uncertainty. The paper also provides a set of recommended distributions and associated parameters that can be used to model uncertainty in a large public hospital's surgical department.What are the implications for practitioners? The insights on surgical uncertainty provided here will prove valuable for administrative staff who want to incorporate uncertainty in their surgical planning and scheduling decisions. PMID: 30185353 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Australian Health Review - Category: Hospital Management Authors: Tags: Aust Health Rev Source Type: research