Experiences of foreign students with scheduled healthcare center medical appointments

Healthcare is an important service that is required by everyone and most developed countries Finland inclusive ensure that all people foreigners alike have unlimited access to it. Reservation of appointments is one of the most common ways through which healthcare services are sought in the developed world. Just like any other method of service acquisition, diverse groups of people experience the use of appointments in healthcare in various ways. This study looked at experiences of appointment booking services in relation to foreign students in one of the Universities of Applied Sciences in Finland. The purpose of the study was to provide information for developing medical appointments implementation in healthcare centers. This was focused on providing information for both healthcare providers and healthcare centers in order to establish foreign patients’ needs and development of appointment booking system. A qualitative research approach was applied. Data was collected from five students. Structured interview guide questionnaires were used to yield detailed response from the students. The results were analyzed by content analysis method. The findings suggested that the students had all generally accessed healthcare using appointments and had various ideas about access and use of appointments. However, there were gaps in their knowledge concerning the existence of online appointment booking services and experienced limited user ability skills given a language barrier problem. The students further expressed their wish for all health enters to adopt online appointment booking systems tailored with various language preferences also

Developing a multi-methodological approach to hospital operating theatre scheduling

Operating theatres and surgeons are among the most expensive resources in any hospital, so it is vital that they are used efficiently. Due to the complexity of the challenges involved in theatre scheduling we split the problem into levels and address the tactical and day-to-day scheduling problems.Cognitive mapping is used to identify the important factors to consider in theatre scheduling and their interactions. This allows development and testing of our understanding with hospital staff, ensuring that the aspects of theatre scheduling they consider important are included in the quantitative modelling.At the tactical level, our model assists hospitals in creating new theatre timetables, which take account of reducing the maximum number of beds required, surgeons’ preferences, surgeons’ availability, variations in types of theatre and their suitability for different types of surgery, limited equipment availability and varying the length of the cycle over which the timetable is repeated. The weightings given to each of these factors can be varied allowing exploration of possible timetables.At the day-to-day scheduling level we focus on the advanced booking of individual patients for surgery. Using simulation a range of algorithms for booking patients are explored, with the algorithms derived from a mixture of scheduling literature and ideas from hospital staff. The most significant result is that more efficient schedules can be achieved by delaying scheduling as close to the time of surgery as possible, however, this must be balanced with the need to give patients adequate warning to make arrangements to attend hospital for their surgery.The different stages of this project present different challenges and constraints, therefore requiring different methodologies. As a whole this thesis demonstrates that a range of methodologies can be applied to different stages of a problem to develop better solutions