Operation Theatre Case Study

Operation theatre is one of the most productive rooms in national guard hospital. With many different surgical operations done on a daily basis, delays in case durations would add extra cost as the result of the extra using of surgical resources. Besides, a good time management in operation theater will increase the overall quality of operating workflow in particular, and the productivity in hospital in general. The unexpected delays in case durations could be due to many factors. These include the surgeon effect, type of anesthesia used, age and gender of patient and rarely due to case-specific variability.[1] One of the most serious consequences of such delays are case cancelations on the day of surgery. Which constitute one of the major problems in health care facilities worldwide.[2] In many hospitals around the world, estimation of surgical operations time is either set by the surgeon or the scheduling office. The anesthesiologist then predicts the time required for induction and anesthesia release time (ART), the time required to release the patient to the surgical team.[3] Any changes in the expected or scheduled times of the operations will consequently lead to changes in anesthesia plan which will increase the cost on the hospital budget.
First of these reasons is surgeon work rate. Participation of a resident physicians can also increase operation time with a subsequence of cost increase. A small part of time variation could be due to anesthesiology work. Slight time variations caused by anesthesia could be due to individual differences between anesthesiologists, performing different types of surgery in one day, training residents or covering more than one room. However, these factors can only delay the operation time for only few minutes.