Transdisciplinary perspectives on waiting for healthcare services in South Africa

Providing all individuals with quality healthcare is a global priority. In South Africa, there is an accelerated need for healthcare services, particularly those provided in hospitals.
However, resources to provide quality healthcare services in hospitals are limited. Additionally, natural and artificial variability of both healthcare demand patterns and resource availability leads to delays in South African hospitals.
These delays can be addressed by adopting techniques in the discipline of Operations Research and Management Science (ORMS), which has been proven to drive efficiencies. Adopting these techniques in South African hospitals can successfully address the challenges around delays caused by variable demand patterns and the availability of resources.
However, to successfully implement such interventions in South African hospitals, research calls for the consideration of several fundamental factors, such as the unique culture and context of the healthcare setting.
This research responds to this need by providing a clear understanding of the challenges and opportunities that the application of the ORMS discipline in South African hospitals poses. Our research further contributes towards the call for a more resilient and responsive health system in South Africa.
In this research, we took a transdisciplinary approach to identify these unique challenges and opportunities by considering the disciplines of ORMS and education and training. With the hospital setting as a health system with multiple stakeholders, we approached the research from a patient, clinical staff and hospital organisational perspective.
From the patient perspective of delays in healthcare settings, we find that waiting is not always detrimental and that there is a need to approach waiting time in healthcare settings from a nuanced approach in ORMS research. To this end, we provide definitions for the terms access time and waiting time that are frequently used to refer to delays in healthcare settings. We also highlight that the quality of patient care and quality of service healthcare are two distinguishable characteristics since the quality of patient care takes voluntary and involuntary waiting time into account. Juxtaposing the quality of patient care and quality of service is, therefore, a prerequisite in solving the waiting time problem in healthcare services as it addresses the variability between the supply of capacity and the demand for healthcare services.
The clinical staff perspective of our research provides insights into the important factors associated with the mental health of nurses in South Africa. Specifically, we propagate that researchers and practitioners of ORMS in healthcare take cognisance of the complexities associated with feelings of burnout and emotional exhaustion of nurses.