A diving heuristic for planning and scheduling surgical cases in the operating room department with nurse re-rostering

The decisions in the operating room scheduling process related to the case mix planning, the master surgery schedule and the nurse roster are based on the expected demand, predicted by historical data. Patients are only scheduled in the operational phase when the actual demand is known. However, the actual patient demand may differ from the expected demand. In this paper, we integrate the surgical case planning and scheduling problem and include the nurse re-rostering decision and nurse assignment to specific patients in order to utilise the operating room department as efficiently as possible and maximise the operating room profit. We propose a two-phase heuristic that uses the LP solution generated via column generation to construct a high-quality feasible solution. Computational experiments have been conducted on a diverse artificial data set generated in a controlled and structured manner and real-life data from the Sina Hospital (Tehran, Iran). We show that the presented approach is able to produce (near-)optimal solutions and benchmark the procedure with other optimisation strategies and solution methodologies.