Challenging the throwaway culture in hospitals: scheduling the mix of reusable and single-use bronchoscopes

Gartner, Daniel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4361-8559, Viana, Joe, Rostami-Tabar, Bahman ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3730-0045, Pförringer, Dominik and Edenharter, Günther 2023. Challenging the throwaway culture in hospitals: scheduling the mix of reusable and single-use bronchoscopes. Journal of the Operational Research Society 74 (10) , pp. 2215-2226. 10.1080/01605682.2022.2129490

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Abstract

Optimal material resource planning is crucial to run safe and cost-efficient hospital services. In this article, we investigate a real problem in hospitals, motivated by an environmental and economically inefficient use of disposable, single-use, endoscopes. We develop a mathematical model and create a decision support tool to determine when reusable, multi-use, bronchoscopes should be sent for inspection including information to what extent single-use bronchoscopes can cover the remaining demand. The results show that the proposed approach can contain operational costs which consist of costs for buying single-use devices, inspection costs and reprocessing costs, i.e., sterilization of reusable devices. Our tool can assist hospitals to predict when reusable bronchoscopes should undergo inspection and whether the current inventory of reusable devices is sufficient to cover the demand. Finally, we evaluate the impact of variation in demand on total costs.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Business (Including Economics) Mathematics
Publisher:	Taylor and Francis Group
ISSN:	1476-9360
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	19 October 2022
Date of Acceptance:	22 September 2022
Last Modified:	11 Dec 2023 14:13
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/152793

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