The surgical suite has multiple and powerful stakeholders. In a public hospital, the government wants to achieve some social measures like: number of patients in the waiting list, number of days in the waiting list, or percentage of patients treated after the clinically acceptable period (maximum response time). The administration of the hospital wants to achieve those goals in order to avoid high contractual penalties; they also desire a high efficiency level of the surgical suite, not only because this is a highly costly service with big influence in many other services in the hospital (e.g., wards) but also because the number and complexity of the surgeries performed represent a significant hospital funding source. At the same time, the surgeries are often scheduled by the surgeons depending on their agenda and on their capacity to remember all of their patients. When a systematic system to select and schedule the patients to be operated in a given week is not available, the surgeons will tend to select the patients they remember the best (e.g. those patients more recently consulted or those patients that pressure the surgeon). This can bring a sort of LIFO strategy to manage the waiting list for surgery which may undermine the government guidelines. In this work, heuristics were developed intending to mimic the different stakeholders’ perspectives for a surgical case assignment problem. Results, using data from a Portuguese hospital, will be presented and discussed. Stream: Scheduling in Healthcare

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