An assessment of the integration of nurse timetable changes with operating room planning and scheduling

The objective of this paper is to understand the links between the management of operating rooms and nurses, and to investigate the trade-offs between the number of operating rooms used, nurses used and overtime work. To do so, we proposed a model that plans and schedules surgical interventions in the operating rooms while considering the availabilities of surgeons and anesthesiologists; the model also includes or discards nurse scheduling. The flexible modeling approach allows us to compare different alternatives, each one representing a different scenario of managing the operating rooms at an operational level. The scenarios were applied to two data-sets and compared on the basis of performance indicators, which include operating costs, utilisation rates of nurses and number of overtime hours done. The important findings were that there is no relationship between the number of nurses required and the number of operating rooms used; the simultaneous scheduling of nurses and surgical interventions provided a better resource usage, a higher occupation rate of nurses, less overtime and furthermore, operating costs were lowered by at least 10% on average.