Weekend operating room on call staffing requirements.

Area of Science:

• Operations Research
• Healthcare Management
• Statistical Modeling

Background:

• Optimizing operating room (OR) staffing is crucial for balancing labor costs and ensuring timely patient care for urgent procedures.
• Current staffing models may not efficiently account for variable demand and the trade-offs between in-house and on-call personnel.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and present a statistical method for determining the minimum number of OR teams required for urgent procedures.
• To minimize labor costs by optimizing the balance between in-house and on-call (from home) staffing.
• To ensure a prespecified service level for emergency procedures.

Main Methods:

• Utilized historical surgical suite data to determine hourly staffing needs over a 24-hour period.
• Calculated the minimum total staffed hours required for a defined acceptable risk of inadequate staffing.
• Employed a shift combination enumeration method to identify the lowest-cost staffing plan that meets service level requirements.

Main Results:

• The study provides a data-driven approach to calculate optimal OR staffing levels.
• Demonstrated a method to efficiently allocate staff between in-house and on-call (from home) roles.
• An example using 248 weeks of data from a large surgical suite illustrates the practical application of the method.

Conclusions:

• The presented statistical method effectively minimizes labor costs for OR staffing while maintaining a high level of service for urgent procedures.
• This approach allows for informed decision-making regarding in-house versus on-call staffing strategies.
• The findings are applicable to surgical suites seeking to improve efficiency in emergency care staffing.