Efficient provision of multiple health services, and thereby high-quality health care requires necessary resources to be dimensioned correctly in the right place at the right time. Typically, resource-related planning problems are treated separately for each service and resource without integrated planning across several resources, services or even providers. This leads to globally sub-optimal decisions and unused potential for high quality health care services.
Therefore, current and future research on Operations Research for health services needs to take a holistic view on integrated planning problems including multiple providers (e.g. hospital, social and home care providers, general practitioners, outpatient facilities, etc.), resources (e.g. beds, clinicians, operating theatres, medical equipment, etc.) or services (diagnostics, treatment, transportation, care services, etc.).
The 49th Annual Meeting of the EURO Working Group on Operational Research Applied to Health Services welcomes contributions taking such a holistic view on health systems and encourages researchers, academics, practitioners and students to present research covering aspects of integrated planning and provision of services.
