Investigating the Impact of Pandemic on the Perioperative Healthcare Workers Availability: An Agent-Based Approach

Protecting healthcare workers (HCWs) during a pandemic is critical to provide timely medical care for patients. Although prior studies have investigated HCW unavailability during the COVID-19 pandemic, the studies have not investigated the impact of parameters such as patient census, vaccination rates, transmission rates, and multiple hospital locations on HCW availability. This research considers a high-risk HCW group of perioperative staff to investigate the impact of segregating and rotating staffing policies on HCW unavailability during a pandemic in a health system with multiple locations. An agent-based model with a SEIR compartmental model was developed to simulate various scenarios. Simulated findings indicate that segregating and rotating policies significantly (p-value <0.01) reduced the peak weekly unavailability of HCWs and the total percentage of HCWs getting infected by as much as 25% and 60% when vaccination rates were lower (<75%). However, these benefits diminished when the vaccination rates increased to 75%.