David Christopher: Orthopedic Surgeon - Case Study Example

Question 1: What is the clinic’s current weekly workload?

Answer 1: Both the surgeons at the clinic have a very busy week treating, checking, and operating various people with many different kinds of problems. The current weekly workload of the clinic involved many surgery procedures including repair of two rotator cuffs, Cartilage knee, fractured tibia/fibula, three Achilles tendon, four ACL ligaments, operations on two fractured wrists, operation on one fractured ankle, two hips replacement operations, three knee replacements and a shoulder replacement.

Question 2: Should the clinic hire more surgeons, and if so, how many?

Answer 2: All the operations and replacements involved surgeons, A and B, with the total time for each surgery ranging between 0 and 540 minutes (Collier and Evans, 225). This is considerably high as only two surgeons are dealing with most of the surgeries reducing their efficiency. Each surgeon sometimes has to operate on more than one patient. So, there is a need to hire more surgeons so as to ease the process and reduce the workload off of each surgeon so that they can cater to more patients.

Increasing the time and the number of days will enable them to maximize patient throughput and surgeries. I will also recommend they increase the workforce available at the clinic. They should hire more surgeons, machines, office support, and nurses so that they can treat and operate on more patients at the same time. This will enable them to maximize their potential of treating patients and conducting surgeries.

Question 5: What is the long-term capacity?

Answer 5: Capacity is the procedural or a systematic output achieved by utilizing maximum potential. It is basically the maximum amount of output that can be produced through a process or a procedure. Decisions related to the capacity of a process or system need to be made keeping in mind the importance of the process in the organization and on the supply chain because altering the capacity of a procedure will have a direct impact on all of the other procedures in the chain. Long-term capacity planning is based on the "economies and diseconomies of scale", the sizing and timing strategies for capacity, and systematic decision making regarding capacity (Krajewski, Ritzman, and Malhotra, 220). These factors need to be considered before planning a long-term change in the capacity as it changes the amount of production in a process and this will be carried for a long time and even a slight change in any of these factors will impact the process to a very big extent.

Question 6: What is the short-term capacity?

Answer 6: Short-term capacity planning is based on the "theory of constraints" (TOC), bottleneck identification and management, decisions regarding the product mix based on bottlenecks,  and constraints management in line processes (Krajewski, Ritzman, and Malhotra, 221). These factors are kept under view and are used while making changes in the short-term capacity of a process or system.