Time and date: 15 March 2023 at 2:00 pm | Location: Abacws 1.04 | Speaker: Matthew Howells
Following the disruption caused by COVID-19, the NHS is struggling with a backlog of patients and growing elective waiting lists, which is currently the case at Cardiff and Vale University Health Board. The Trauma & Orthopaedics specialty is especially under pressure with high demand for elective surgery driven by both the unprecedented backlog size and ageing population. I’ll present the key results of my systematic review into operational research methods applied to orthopaedic settings and treatments. I have further developed a discrete-event simulation that models patient flows through a holistic orthopaedic surgical pathway, enabling hospital staff to make more informed decisions on demand and capacity planning. Furthermore, I discuss plans to combine the discrete-event simulation with a system dynamics model to assess the inflows from Primary care and the community, and to incorporate into the simulation patient deterioration whilst on the waitlists.
