Increasing Operating Room Throughput Just Buzzwords for This Decade?

IN the 1990s, Dexter et al.1 showed clearly that one has to reduce turnover time by more than 50 % of the surgical duration to be able to do one additional case. But in the first decade of this new century, three reports chal-lenged this concept and showed that additional cases could be done.2–4 These reports focused on improving operating room (OR) throughput, not by reducing the time it takes to accomplish OR turnover, but instead doing the multiple tasks of turnover simultaneously. That is, changing the nonoperative activities from a series process to a parallel process. With these initial reports, several unanswered questions still remained, including “Can these initiatives be sustained for the long-term? ” and “Do you need build special facilities to ac-complish the change in process? ” In this month’s ANES