Hospital logistics during and after COVID-19

Hospital logistics during and after COVID-19

Co-applicant

Subsidy from: ZonMw
Time period: 2020
Budget : €25,000
Consortium Partner: Martini Hospital Groningen

Hospitals in the Netherlands are busy resuming regular care, in which the safety of patients is paramount. The 1.5 meter society provides hospitals with new challenges in healthcare logistics. To ensure that patients can keep a distance of 1.5 meters from each other at all times, the capacity of waiting rooms will be significantly reduced. The capacity of the care system is suddenly determined by the maximum available space in the waiting room. This requires developing a new method to plan all processes so that as many appointments as possible can continue.

Under these circumstances, a hospital can take four types of measures to reduce the number of patients in a waiting room, namely:

1. rearrange waiting rooms
2. reducing the number of appointments scheduled in a day,
3. introducing new organizational measures to regulate patient arrivals,
4. designing new appointment schedules.

Hospital appointment schedules are usually set up in such a way that the process runs smoothly, that doctors have a pleasant work schedule and that the correct amounts of all types of appointments are scheduled. But the schedules are not designed to minimize the number of patients waiting. However, that is now of the utmost importance. Because fewer patients can sit in the waiting room at the same time, this suddenly becomes a decisive factor in determining whether an appointment schedule is good. The aim of this project is to provide a planning tool for hospitals in which new appointment schedules are determined so that the number of patients waiting is minimized, while taking into account as much as possible the ease of use for doctors and gradually increasing the number of appointments that can be scheduled. By using this planning tool by hospitals in the Netherlands, we aim to obtain generic insights into how regular healthcare capacity can be scaled up as safely as possible.