How to schedule surgical operations into operating rooms? An application in Turkey

Planning and scheduling play very important role in health care. Effective scheduling optimizes the utilization of scarce resources such as surgeons, operating rooms, and devices in hospitals. The operating rooms are regarded as the hospital's engine, and they are considered among the most costly hospital facilities. This study presents a model for operating room resource scheduling. A mathematical model is developed for optimizing the performance measures (i.e., minimizing the number of unscheduled surgical operations). Using this model, we not only determine the allocation of surgeries to operating rooms but also the sequence of surgeries within operating rooms. The proposed model is tested using the real data obtained from a university research hospital in Turkey.