Evaluating the impact of flexible practices on the master surgical scheduling process: an empirical analysis

This study focuses on the master surgical scheduling problem and adds two main contributions. First, it presents a novel mixed integer programming model to support the master surgical schedule production. Second, it uses the model to investigate the impact, in terms of scheduled surgeries, of the flexible management of three critical resources, namely surgical teams, operating rooms and surgical units. Our analysis revealed that to maximise the number of surgeries scheduled, it is sufficient to introduce flexibility with respect to surgical teams and ORs. In fact, if both these resources are managed flexibly, then introducing flexibility with respect to surgical units carries no additional advantages. However, if surgical teams or ORs (or both) are not managed flexibly, then managing surgical units flexibly produces significant benefits. In addition, our study shows that if surgical teams cannot be managed flexibly, then introducing flexibility with respect to ORs yields significant benefits. Similarly, it reveals that if ORs cannot be managed flexibly, then introducing flexibility with respect to surgical teams yields significant benefits as well. The work is based on real data from the Meyer University Children’s Hospital in Florence.