Improving operating theatre design using facilities layout planning

Operating theatre (OT) is one of the most critical departments within the hospital. In developing countries, no allocation of sufficient areas for OT, that results in sharing of many services in the same area while ignoring others. Facilities layout planning (FLP) is widely used in industrial engineering for designing block layout plans as it considers the assignment of services to the proper locations. Hence, FLP can solve management and hospital design problems, reduce nursing staff effort and improve overall healthcare environment. The problem presented in this study is an optimization one, which maximizes the subjective closeness rating between different services in the OT considering international standards. Some heuristic approaches have been developed for solving FLP problem; the most successful were based on graph theoretic concepts. This paper proposes a solution by generating an OT layout design based on the graph theoretic approach. It is divided into two sub-problems; the first one is the adjacency problem that defines the desirability of locating pair of spaces adjacent to each other. The second one is the block layout problem which was solved by using manual traditional qualitative technique (the spiral technique). The output of the technique was several possible designs and a layout score that was calculated for each design. This allows for selecting the most appropriate design for each end user. Computing the layout score, before and after reallocation of the OT spaces, resulted in an increase by 18.5% in the first hospital. For the second hospital, more services had to be added in addition to the reallocation process, this resulted in an increase in the layout score by 45%.