Reserving capacity for emergency surgery evenly across all elective operating rooms reduced mean waiting times from 74 minutes to 8 minutes compared to using a dedicated emergency operating room.
Does reserving capacity for emergency surgery in all elective ORs improve waiting times and OR efficiency compared to dedicated emergency ORs?
Distributing emergency surgical capacity across all elective operating rooms significantly reduces patient waiting times and improves OR efficiency compared to using a dedicated emergency OR.
Absolute Event Rate: 8% vs 74%
Long waiting times for emergency operations increase a patient's risk of postoperative complications and morbidity. Reserving Operating Room (OR) capacity is a common technique to maximize the responsiveness of an OR in case of arrival of an emergency patient. This study determines the best way to reserve OR time for emergency surgery. In this study two approaches of reserving capacity were compared: (1) concentrating all reserved OR capacity in dedicated emergency ORs, and (2) evenly reserving capacity in all elective ORs. By using a discrete event simulation model the real situation was modelled. Main outcome measures were: (1) waiting time, (2) staff overtime, and (3) OR utilisation were evaluated for the two approaches. Results indicated that the policy of reserving capacity for emergency surgery in all elective ORs led to an improvement in waiting times for emergency surgery from 74 (+/-4.4) minutes to 8 (+/-0.5) min. Working in overtime was reduced by 20%, and overall OR utilisation can increase by around 3%. Emergency patients are operated upon more efficiently on elective Operating Rooms instead of a dedicated Emergency OR. The results of this study led to closing of the Emergency OR in the Erasmus MC (Rotterdam, The Netherlands).
Wullink et al. (Tue,) conducted a other in Emergency surgery (n=4,000). Reserving capacity for emergency surgery in all elective ORs vs. Dedicated emergency OR was evaluated on Mean waiting time for emergency surgery (minutes). Reserving capacity for emergency surgery evenly across all elective operating rooms reduced mean waiting times from 74 minutes to 8 minutes compared to using a dedicated emergency operating room.