Friday, September 28, 2012

Will reducing anesthesia turn over time add a case?


Dr. Cartier


Decreases in Anesthesia-Controlled Time Cannot Permit One Additional Surgical Operation to Be Reliably Scheduled During the Workday.
Franklin Dexter, M.D., Ph.D.; Stacy Coffin, M.D.; and John H. Tinker, M.D.;Anesthesia & Analgesia, Vol. 81, pp. 1263-1268, 1995

            This study was designed in order to analyze how anesthesia controlled time (ACT) can be more effectively managed in order more efficiently treat patients, and thus optimizing the number of cases performed in a given work day.  ACT was defined as the time the patient arrived in the OR until the patient left the OR, minus the surgical case time.  709 consecutive cases were statistically analyzed, and the results showed that ACT would have to be decreased by over 100% in order to permit increasing the total number of cases by one case in a given workday.  This is a very interesting study.  It seems to indicate that at this particular facility the ACT was already fairly efficient if such a drastic improvement would be necessary in order to increase the case load by one, suggesting that perhaps other factors, such as surgical time, or check-in/nursing factors may need to be analyzed to more effectively operate more cases in one day.

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