The impact of scheduling pediatric operating room sessions

The need for specialized anesthesia equipment for pediatric patients and the preference for audiovisual separation of pediatric and adult patients in the hospital can be addressed by separating pediatric surgeries in one or more fully equipped operating rooms (ORs). Although this separation benefits the equipment use, the planning of specialized anesthesiologists and the patient experience, its impact on patient scheduling has barely been studied. The aim of this study is to assess the feasibility of allocating OR sessions to pediatric patients with regards to keeping the access times of both adult and pediatric patients within acceptable limits and with regards to the change in several operational performance measures. Introducing these separate pediatric sessions obviously decreases the scheduling flexibility. The question is whether this decrease is acceptable compared to the benefits the separation offers. We assess several scenarios using a data-driven simulation model, based on a real academic hospital setting. The results show that the percentage of patients that are served within their due time is only slightly affected when looking at adult and pediatric patients together, but this percentage drops by 13 (s = 6.22) percentage points if we isolate the performance of the pediatric patients. This decrease for some disciplines can be as large as 69 percentage points. Therefore, from a planning point of view, it is advised to only organize pediatric sessions for the disciplines whose performance drop is acceptable. Alternatively, for future research, the capacity allocation could be optimized for each discipline individually to account for the discipline’s characteristics. Moreover, studies on the difference in patient experience would complement this study.