A multiobjective stochastic program for hospital bed planning

Abstract

In this paper, we study hospital bed capacity management for a set of existing hospitals when the demand for beds is random. We propose a multiobjective stochastic program model to assign beds to hospital departments. We consider three objective functions to be minimized, which are the cost of creation and management of new beds and the number of nurses and physicians working in these hospitals, subject to demand satisfaction of three kinds of health-care specialities. A certainty equivalent program was derived based on a mixture between the chance constrained approach, the recourse approach and the goal programming approach. Empirical results using real data from 157 Tunisian national hospitals are reported.

Keywords:

• hospital bed capacity management
• multiobjective stochastic programming
• goal programming
• chance constrained approach
• recourse approach

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.