Optimisation of Surgical Waiting List Management (Vacation Research)
Project description: Summer research project undertaken as part of the AMSI Vacation Research Scholarships program
Abstract: Patients awaiting elective surgery in Australia can often experience long wait times to receive care due to high demand and limited capacity of the health care system. Currently in Australia, patients are placed on a waiting list and assigned a nationally defined classification indicating the urgency of the surgery, determined from a range of clinical factors. However, this classification process can be subjective and up to the discretion of the treating health professional, leading to potential inequities in waiting times. This project investigated prioritising patients through use of a scoring system, incorporating clinical factors and time spent on the waiting list to determine a priority score. Patients are admitted to surgery in descending order of this score, which is updated regularly. Limited summary statistics were able to be collected due to lack of comparable patient data (which was randomly generated), however it was found that the priority score model fundamentally changed patient ordering and the behaviour of basic summary statistics were similar to that found in existing literature. Further research would be required to determine the magnitude of additional fairness and equability, if any, this novel system would provide over that of the current ranking system.