Abstract: In many hospitals, surgical departments are typically allocated to operating rooms and time slots on given weekdays into which they are able to book elective surgeries. This is the case of the operating theatre of a German hospital where each surgical group informs the operating room (OR) manager of the elective cases that will be performed on the following day. During the surgery day, the OR manager gradually details the OR schedule as time unfolds. Currently, there is the belief that this modus operandi neither maximizes the utilization of the available resources nor minimizes the costs of the operating theatre. Before changing the current practice, the hospital would like to know the potential impact of a number of scenarios. We developed a mixed integer linear programming model that is embedded in a preemptive goal programming framework to create a schedule for next day’s surgeries. The base scenario depicts the current situation of dedicated rooms to surgical groups. In the second scenario, surgeries may be performed in non‐preferred rooms and deviations from dedicated rooms are minimized. The third scenario analyses the policy of opening the ORs to all surgical groups. This option would dramatically change the current role of the OR manager. In a second step, each scenario was also considered with the option of performing anaesthesia induction outside the OR, a practice that is currently not followed by the hospital but that could allow a higher utilization of the operating theatre. All scenarios were evaluated using real data provided by the hospital. One of the main challenges was to estimate the duration of the various activities involved in each surgery. We compare various OR schedules by means of several performance indicators. Based on the computational study, recommendations for the implementation of a new policy are discussed.