Report 40: Optimal scheduling rules for elective care to minimize years of life lost during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic: an application to England

Abstract

Summary Countries have deployed a wide range of policies to prioritize patients to hospital care to address unprecedent surges in demand during the course of the pandemic. Those policies included postponing planned hospital care for non-emergency cases and rationing critical care. We develop a model to optimally schedule elective hospitalizations and allocate hospital general and critical care beds to planned and emergency patients in England during the pandemic. We apply the model to NHS England data and show that optimized scheduling leads to lower years of life lost and costs than policies that reflect those implemented in England during the pandemic. Overall across all disease areas the model enables an extra 50,750 - 5,891,608 years of life gained when compared to standard policies, depending on the scenarios. Especially large gains in years of life are seen for neoplasms, diseases of the digestive system, and injuries & poisoning.