Abstract

The Latrobe Regional Hospital (in the Australian state of Victoria) is an amalgamation of the Traralgon and Moe Hospitals and The Hobson Park Psychiatric Facility. It is a 257 bed facility comprising of medical, surgical, maternity, aged care and psychiatric services. The Operating Suite consists of 4 operating rooms, anaesthetic set up rooms, Day Surgery Facility, Sterile Services and a recovery suite; it is staffed with a full time equivalent of 42 people, over 9000 procedures per annum are carried out. It is shown that a detailed analysis of utilisation, clinical processes and layout of the theatres at the new LRH would facilitate the implementation of efficiencies, which have improved throughput and enhance patient access to the theatre facilities and that these methods could be easily applied to any hospital.

This paper will discuss how the objective of the research was to see if an improvement in theatre efficiency and patient access to surgical facilities by using Earned Value Performance Methodologies (EVPM) could be established.

It discusses on how a model was established to improve the effective performance measurement of casemix usage of the operating suite using non-traditional healthcare methods.

Currently no operating suite (in the public sector) appears to budget or forecast its annual casemix list in theatre. Lists are cancelled, quite often at short notice and either theatres lie underused as a result or a number of hours of clerical and theatre staff time is expended in trying to fill the shortfall. This leads to a loss of income, under-utilised WIES points, closures of beds because there is no system to forecast how to retrieve the situation.

How casemix is funded via WIES is shown in Appendix 1. A short overview of EVPM is illustrated in Appendix 2 and a more traditional use of EVPM for project management of healthcare projects is shown in Appendix 3.

The initial conclusion of the research is that the use of EVPM can provide a method to manage casemix and deliver improvements in the management of WIES.

Since the initial research in 1999 and 2000, further work has been carried out to develop an improved relationship with the medical practitioners involved in theatre, to establish whether or not Service Level Agreements could be developed to help with an improved delivery of services, than current practice.