We find that half of the ORMS research on the waiting and access time problem is done on Ambulatory Care services. We provide clear definitions and examples of access time and waiting time, and we classify our search results according to three categories: article type, healthcare service investigated and ORMS technique used to solve the delay problem. An important step towards reducing the ambiguity in the definitions is to distinguish between access time and waiting time. We search for articles from 2004 to 2019 and base our search strategy on a well-known healthcare planning and control decision taxonomy. We present a systematic search and review of the Operations Research and Management Science (ORMS) literature on delays in healthcare services. Ambiguous definitions of waiting time make it difficult to compare and measure the problems related to waiting times and delays in healthcare. There are various terms used for waiting time ('sojourn', 'throughput' etc.) and there is no consensus on how these terms are defined.
Waiting time in healthcare is a significant problem that occurs across the world and often has catastrophic effects.
