Optimisation of Surgical Waiting List Management (PhD Project)
Project description: PhD project looking into using mathematics to more equitably and transparently order public elective surgery patients in Queensland, Australia
Broad Overview
In the Australian public health system, there is often a long waiting list for patients to access elective surgeries due to high demand and limited capacity of the health system. Currently in Australia, patients are assigned a nationally defined classification indicating the urgency of the surgery. For each of the three urgency categories, there is an associated recommend time frame in which a patient should receive treatment:
- Urgent (Category 1) — surgery recommended within 30 days of being added to the wait list
- Semi-urgent (Category 2)— surgery recommended within 90 days of being added to the wait list
- Non-urgent (Category 3) — surgery recommended within 365 days of being added to the wait list
Priority scoring systems have been proposed in a range of literature as an alternative to the current three category system, where patients are ranked according to some mathematical formula that take into account a patients’ clinical factors and waiting time to generate a priority score. The aim of such a system is to enhance the equity of waiting lists by utilising clear and defensible criteria to rank patients, increasing the transparency of the system as well as actively ensuring that semi-urgent and non-urgent patients do not wait exceptional amounts of time for care. However, the functional form of prioritisation formulas in the literature have largely been arbitrary. This research will explore the use of genetic programming to optimise the functional form of the prioritisation formula to maximise key performance metrics.
Publications
- Powers, J., McGree, J.M., Grieve, D. et al. Managing surgical waiting lists through dynamic priority scoring. Health Care Management Science 26, 533–557 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10729-023-09648-1
Articles
- Cosmos Magazine - Applied maths to the rescue: the Jack Powers story
- QUT Centre for Data Science - Maths model aims to cut elective surgery waiting lists
Presentations
- 2022 QUT Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Finalist - video link
- 2022 Visualise Your Thesis (VYT) Competition Presentation - video link
- 2021 QUT Centre of Data Science End of Year Show Case poster presentations - poster link
Awards
- Awarded the inaugural 1000minds Decision-Making Scholarship based on submission of the project’s research proposal.