Background: Waiting time is a common phenomenon in the Danish healthcare system, as there are scarce resources in the healthcare system everywhere. This places the healthcare system under increasing pressure due to a steadily increasing elderly population, expectations of better and better quality, and more expensive treatment options, the latter, mainly due to technological and medical achievements. This means that the Danish health service has to perform more with the same or fewer resources, while the number of taxpayers are getting reduced. Therefore, the health economics is debated increasingly in the Danish media. Hence, it is natural to be interested in resource allocation and adaptation of the capacity for demanding the treatment at the Danish hospitals. Hospitals may face a situation of over or under capacity. Overcapacity results in waste of resources while under capacity give rise to waiting times.
Method: The project has been prepared in collaboration with Aalborg University Hospital for the purpose of applying the chosen theoretical tools in practice. The project is based on mixed methods to answer the problem formulation. From the mixed method paradigm, quantitative approaches have been used to make descriptive statistics on the data obtained in collaboration with Aalborg University Hospital and Region North Jutland, which is used to predict the steady state of waiting based on the queue theory from Agner Krarup Erlang. The qualitative approach is based on a semi-structured interview with sectional anesthesia nurse and observations of and interviews with staff during the cooperation process. This approach is based on Henry Mintzberg’s organizational theory and Edgar Henry Scheins’s cultural theory and is used to discuss the culture of the operation section.
Results: The results of waiting time calculations, based on the capacity of anesthesia nurses, indicate that the need for surgery with an average rate of 23 patients a day (min 7 and max 39 patients) and one treatment time of 1 hour and 42 minutes is 39 hours and 24 minutes. The OP section can, with the current anesthetist nurse’s capacity, perform 44 hours and 3 minutes of surgery, which corresponds to approx.
25 operations. This gives a capacity utilization of approx. 89% and a probability of experiencing a waiting time of about 31%, resulting in a waiting time of 0.11 days. Conclusion: Based on the results presented, it can be concluded that the operation section is capable of handling current demand with a capacity equivalent to 25 operations. This capacity appears to be appropriate for the current approach, as this procedure is for elective and acute patients. Due to natural variation in the acute arrival stage, capacity can not be planned accurately in advance. Therefore, this must be included in the capacity considerations. Based on the qualitative data, it is concluded that among anaesthetists, there is a unique culture that appears on the unconscious level, which characterizes their perceptions and actions in relation to mono- and interdisciplinary cooperation.