Increasing Patient Accessibility to a Surgery Department Through Operations Management Principles

Paper in proceeding, 2014

This paper investigates how the application of operations management principles can be used to increase patients’ access to an inpatient care facility that supplies acute and non-acute care, in a Swedish University Hospital. This paper also identifies problems and solutions related to patient flow, as well as facilitators and barriers to implementation process. The study shows that patient accessibility can be increased by using operations management principles such as separated flows. The implementation was facilitated by short term gains, management support, and visible leadership. The barriers to implementation were identified as lack of operations management knowledge, deficiencies in improvement work and regulations.