Shift and duty scheduling of surgical technicians in Naval Hospitals
Loading...
Authors
Nurse, Nigel A.
Subjects
Advisors
Dell, Robert F.
Date of Issue
2004-09
Date
Publisher
Monterey, CA; Naval Postgraduate School
Language
Abstract
Surgical technicians at Naval hospitals provide a host of services related to surgical procedures that include handing instruments to surgeons, assisting operating room nurses, prepping and cleaning operating rooms, and administrative duties. At the Naval Medical Center San Diego (NMCSD), there are 83 surgical technicians that must be scheduled for these duties. The three military and one civilian hospital interviewed for this thesis manually schedule these duties. Weaknesses of these manual schedules exposed during interviews at these hospitals include assignment inequities and the time needed to create them. This thesis reports on an optimization based and spreadsheet implemented tool developed to schedule surgical technicians for both daily and weekly duties at a Naval hospital. We demonstrate the tool for the surgical technician department at NMCSD. The schedulers at NMCSD verify the utility of the developed tool and cite a drastic reduction in the time required to generate timely, equitable, and accurate schedules. The study also investigates historical operating room usage data and makes suggestions for improving scheduling practices based on these data.
Type
Thesis
Description
Series/Report No
Department
Systems Engineering Management
Organization
Naval Postgraduate School (U.S.)
Identifiers
NPS Report Number
Sponsors
Funder
Format
xiv, 35 p. : ill. (some col.)
Citation
Distribution Statement
Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.
Rights
This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.