Simulating a Portuguese hospital master surgery schedule

Hospital performance is a critical issue in society and its assessment must be tactfully studied in order to evaluate future decisions. In this paper we report an operating theatre study based on a simulation model, describing one of the biggest public hospitals in the north of Portugal. The model encompasses several operating rooms shared among different medical services and considers the arrival of both elective and emergency patients. We focus on a critical planning problem of the operating theatre, the allocation of medical services to operating rooms and shifts. With a discrete-event simulation model we assess the performance of the current schedule distribution and perform a set of tests in order to find a better master surgery schedule. Experiments show improvement opportunities by balancing surgical services capacities.