Hunter New England Area Health Service
Hunter New England Area Health Service is a large governmental health services organization in New South Wales, Australia. Serving approximately 850,000 people, the HNEAHS includes 3 teriary hospitals, 4 rural referral hospitals, 12 district hospitals and 10 community hospitals. NovaSim, working together with PricewaterhouseCoopers Australia, developed a comprehensive simulation model to help manage surgical block management and overall waitlist management for two of the largest facilities in the region. Used to solve a variety of what-if questions when it was first developed, the model remains in consistent use several years later as an ongoing wait list management tool.
Project Goals
- Support the creation of a plan for managing the wait list to meet health service goals and governmental targets
- Evaluate changes to theatre block schedules
- Determine when and how to introduce new scheduling blocks
- Evaluate alternative patient-to-block assignment algorithms
- Evaluate alternate block filling algorithms (sequence of patients within a block)
- Determine the impact of changes to the roster of surgeons
- Evaluate shifting specialties or procedures to alternate surgical facilities
- Model a dedicated orthopedic facility
- Examine the impact of shifting all cataract surgeries to a regional hospital instead of dedicating the tertiary referral hospital's surgical resources
System Elements
- 9 operating theatres at John Hunter Hospital and 5 at the Royal New Castle
- More than 90 surgeons
- 30 surgical subspecialties
- Approximately 18,000 surgeries annually
- 245 "intended procedure" codes
- Wait list elective surgeries, organized into 4 categories
- Within 30 days
- Within 90 days
- Within 365 days
- Not Ready for Care
- Acute surgeries, grouped into 6 urgency categories
- Immediate
- less than 1 hour
- less than 2 hours
- less than 6 hours
- less than 24 hours
- More than 24 hours
- Procedure times organized by IPC, Surgeon, and category
SIMUL8 Window with the Patients (Demand) on left and Surgical Blocks (Capacity) on right