Improving Accessibility of Mental Healthcare through Operations Research
PhD candidate: Lars van der Meer
In the Netherlands and many other countries, access times to mental healthcare are excessively long and exceed the national waiting time standards. This is due to increased demand and a shortage of staff. Therefore, the available resources must be utilised as efficiently as possible. In this project, we aim to develop integral capacity management methods for the multidisciplinary mental healthcare setting. Firstly, we identify care pathways to model and forecast demand across an entire treatment plan. Using this demand model, we develop resource allocation algorithms. For example, we work on an admission planning algorithm that balances patient access times and capacity overutilisation. Furthermore, we study appointment planning on a tactical level to balance new intakes with ongoing treatment. By developing these methods in close collaboration with multiple mental healthcare organisations, we aim to support planning decisions to allocate capacity efficiently and provide patients with timely access to the right treatment.
External supervisors:
- Werner Scheinhardt