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This study compares three different scheduling policies in the Master Surgical Scheduling context with respect to three performance criteria: efficiency, i.e. the capability of scheduling a large number of surgeries; balancing, i.e. the capability to distribute workload fairly among the resources involved in surgical activities; and robustness, i.e. the capability to prevent schedule disruptions caused by variability of surgical time and length of stay. We develop a mixed-integer programming model and compare three objective functions, each corresponding to a different scheduling policy. All the policies maximise the number of scheduled surgeries and balance the utilisation of post-surgical beds and operating rooms. However, they implement a different balancing criterion. To assess the robustness of the schedules produced by the optimisation model, we used a discrete event simulation model that samples surgical times …