This paper addresses the problem of managing a waiting list for elective surgery to
decide the number of patients selected from the waiting list and to schedule them in
accordance with the operating room capacity in the next period. The waiting list
prioritizes patients not only by their initial urgency level but also by their waiting
time. Selecting elective surgery patients requires a balance between the waiting time for
urgent patients and that for less urgent patients. The problem is formulated as an
infinite horizon Markov Decision Process. Further, the study proposes a scheduling
procedure based on structural properties of an optimal policy by taking a sampling-based
finite horizon approximation approach. Finally, we examine the performance of the policy
under various conditions.