ABSTRACT
From an operations management point of view, hospital care processes are considered to be rather complex as compared to processes in industry or most other types of service organisations.This may explain the difficulties that often are encountered during efforts to apply operations management principles and techniques in hospital care settings. However, complex operational processes also exist in industry, and operations management principles and techniques have been successfully applied to many of them.The question, therefore, is to identify the assumptions underlying the operations management principles that have been developed over the last decades in industry and to find out which of these assumptions are justified in hospital care.
