Inpatient bed management considering collaboration strategy to enhance hospital resilience

Hospitals are critical facilities which have a great role to affects the number of mass casualties after disasters. Hence, it is necessary to adopt strategies to increase hospitals preparedness and to improve their resilience. The present paper tries to propose a strategy to cope with surge of demands under disruptions in a hospital. An optimization model for bed management considering collaboration between hospital wards in order to minimize the waiting times of the patients provided in this research and the objective function under the proposed strategy and without the proposed strategy were compared. The results show that the proposed strategy can reduce the patients waiting time under disruptions. Due to the complexity of the proposed model, a Lagrangian relaxation-based heuristic is developed to solve the model. Computational results show that the proposed algorithm is able to reach desirable gap in a reasonable time.